Case+41+-+Ms.+K's+High+School+Multimedia+Courses

Ms. K is a high school business education teacher who teaches photo editing and web design courses. She provides her students with several copyrighted images to use for their projects. The students learn to utilize Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft FrontPage to manipulate the images that Ms. K provides. For example, she provides the students with an image of the Eiffel Tower from famouswonders.com that they are required to manipulate colors and blending options on as well as add an image of themselves and a friend. They then incorporate their Eiffel Tower Photoshop image into a web page that they create in Microsoft FrontPage with information that they research about the Eiffel Tower. Their finished projects are saved to the district’s network to be graded and shared with the class but are never published to the web.

Commentary

According to the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia, students are permitted to use images when creating multimedia projects for a specific course. They can even use them in a portfolio for a job or school. However, the guidelines limit that “a photograph or illustration may be used in its entirety but no more than 5 images by an artist or photographer may be reproduced or otherwise incorporated”. In addition, “when using photographs or illustrations from a collective work, no more than 10% or 15 images, whichever is less, may be reproduced”. Therefore, it seems that as long as Ms. K obtains the images from multiple sources within the guidelines of no more than 5 images from one artist or 10% or 15 images from a collective work and intends them for educational purposes, this situation would fall under fair use. Additionally, Ms. K is allowed to use the specific image for 2 years before she must ask for permission. Ms. K can simply change the Eiffel Tower image after two years' use, or at her own discretion. As long as she is fulfilling a legitimate teaching experience, Fair Use guidelines/laws are not being broken.

Source for Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia: http://ccumc.org/system/files/MMFUGuides.pdf

Additional Commentary:

Ms. K is following the law regarding fair use of images obtained online. She is providing one image for all the students to use for educational pursuits. It is not stated whether the students are being educated on how to publish their web pages online. Is the school providing web space for the students to upload their images and or web pages on the district web site? What if the students decide to use their image in their portfolios? Either way Ms. K should give the students the copyright information so if they decide at a later date to use the image in their portfolios they can properly credit the source. ~ Amy B.

Speaking to Amy's comments above...according to section 3.1 of the aforementioned MMFU Guidelines, "Students may perform and display their own educational multimedia projects created under Section 2 of these guidelines...and may use them in their own portfolios..." Also, it would seem that posting to the Internet is definitely not advised - even posting to an internal network is only allowed for 15 days. Then again, a field trip to Paris would work since it's okay to photograph public buildings without copyright concerns. ~GregM