Category: Education

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication from the Center for Social Media.

This guide identifies four situations that represent the current consensus within the community of communication scholars about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials … it describes how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations.

I have spent a long time reading up on copyright and fair use because they have serious implications for an information junkie, like me. As a teacher, I have often heard strange ideas from administrators, teachers, students, and parents about how copyright, fair use, and attribution work. This isn’t exactly surprising considering The Associated Press wants to charge you for quotations (even though you don’t pay to quote someone).

The common situations in this code are described so that it’s easy to understand what to do when the situation happens in a teacher’s professional life. I hope teachers read it, and it helps to facilitate better lessons and products.