Fair Use

Yesterday afternoon I took part in a conversation about what fair use and copyright looks like in the K-12 classroom. I was invited when the head of our upper-school was unable to attend, and because I am the adviser to the yearbook and the newspaper and I teach Journalism and Media Studies, I was asked to fill his chair. This was not a place to learn what we can and cannot do; this was a conversation about what is normative practice in the classroom. The discussion was organized and moderated by Renee Hobbs of Temple University’s Media Education Lab and the research is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The conversation was one of perhaps eight such conversations that the researchers from Temple and American Universities are undertaking to essentially poll the studio audience. Peter Jaszi, copyright law scholar from AU, expressed the researchers’ thinking this way. If there was a major challenge to the fair use exemption of copyright protection in schools, judges deciding the case would not look to other judges to make a decision but to the community of practice to determine what constituted fair use. So, they have set about to determine exactly what is the practice in the K-12 classroom. He suggested that almost everything we as teachers assume about copyright law is probably not quite true, (see their initial findings about copyright confusion and media literacy here) and he was candid about the fact that we probably restrict ourselves too much as teachers. He cited a very much for-profit case where the fair use exemption of copyright protection was upheld. If you are curious about the case (the Grateful Dead coffee table book), you can read the decision here: Bill Graham Archive v Dorling Kindersley Publishing

It seemed to me that all of the benchmarks that we traditionally look to fall away in the face of “transformative use.” When we or our students create something new from existing work, we would appear to be covered by the fair use exemption. Did we bring the work to a new, unanticipated audience? That’s transformative. Did we analyse it or put it in a context not intended in its original publication/release? That’s transformative. Did we alter it in any way? That’s transformative.

New ways of making work available, like Creative Commons, makes it easier for us to share, remix, mashup, and reuse. But we also need to be assured that the fair use exemption to copyright law is there to help us create, innovate, and teach. With copyright law much stronger and longer, it’s hard to find an author/artist/copyright holder whose work falls into the public domain. The fair use exemption allows us to flex creative muscles and lets our students flex theirs. But, Jaszi reminded us last night, it’s a use or lose it proposition. When there is a challenge to an educator regarding their use of the fair use exception to copyright law, the courts will look to us as a community to see how we work with copyright law.

I am looking forward to November when the Center for Social Media publishes its second set of findings. They are looking to create a Best Practice in Fair Use for teachers. Using the model that they developed with the Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement, they hope to clarify best practices and peel away the myths that surround copyright law.

I came away from last night’s conversation confused (what I thought I know, I don’t know) and oddly relieved. Now I don’t know nothin’ ’bout copyright law, but I’m willing to take a chance!

Senioritis

It’s a Friday, and I have the pleasure of teaching two of my classes of seniors: one at 8:10 in the morning,, and one at 1:00 in the afternoon. Both classes are sleepy; the ‘just rolled out of bed’ crowd and the ‘post lunch drowsies’ patrol. The morning class was my journalism class and we screened Chris Hegedus & DA Pennebaker’s The War Room. This idea came to me after the criticism that George Stephanopoulos received after the most recent ABC debate between Clinton and Obama.

I asked the class at the time of the debate if they thought that GS had a vested interest in Hillary’s campaign. Blank looks followed. I forget, because the students here posture as politically active and aware, that they were two years old when Bill Clinton was running against George HW Bush.

So we began looking at the film, and they are amazed at how James Carville works the press. We had to stop at a point where there was some question about what would happen next, and lo, and behold, they were all awake and engaged. I know that the campaign manager did not participate in this documentary and because of it we see the “spin” part of the campaign. But as student journalists, they need to think about how we are being spun. Note to self… keep it real.

The Bluest Eye or Beloved?

My class is reading Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (TBE) and two of my colleagues are reading/have read with their classes Beloved.

My students, as heterogeneous a bunch as you are going to find here, are enjoying the TBE and we are looking at the book through (as she suggests in the afterward) Morrison’s own lens of society and the expectations that are placed, not just on young women of color, but on young women and men everywhere to conform to ideas of beauty and behavior. When advertising for TiVo suggests that you can be a big man with your buddies and still have time for your woman, what does that say about who we are expected to be? We are expected to be consumers of television, consumers of sports (if a man), and heterosexual. We should have a big TV, and money for cable TV and TiVo because without them and the social currency of who won that game and how, we will not fit in.

So do I choose this contemporary story, with its indictment of SeeSpotRun and the Shirley Temple babydoll that all little girls are supposed to adore, and the secrets about Pecola and the marigolds (“Quiet as it’s kept…”) over Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs and Beloved and the secrets of the house at 124? Both of them have the call to “love yourself.” Book orders, fortunately, are not due for a few weeks.

First Post

Today one of my poetry presenters did not show up, so we had some unplanned time. The amazing synchronicity of the following events led to a collaborative poem.

Yesterday, one of my students brought us Jim Carroll, and his 8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain, and Carroll was in the company of Robert Frost and recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Bob Dylan. Today another student reintroduced her classmates to Wallace Stevens. There were 15 students in class today, so each wrote their own stanza regarding the stapler. Here is the result. You can hear Stevens and Carroll in the work.

15 ways of Looking at a Stapler

1

A bind brings satisfaction,

it is valued with a sense of stability.

There is reassurance and tranquility in a staple

but with one tear, it could all be undone.

2

The stapler sits there

dull, lifeless,

and rarely ever used

but not useless.

3

Lonely boy moves from his corner

Greeting his trusty new metal companion

Its gleaming teeth disperse

pair by pair

An injection of serenity

4

Oh, thin men of Parker

Why do you imagine blue staples?

Do you not see how the stapler

Staples around the bagpipes

Of the colonel about you?

5

A bullet punctures the flesh

A fast moving objective

While the staple’s soul breaks through the paper

6

Among the piles of paper,

the only thing keeping order

the stapler was holding it all together

7

The monkey lies

Stapler kisses aren’t so sweet

but at least

pierced knuckles are sexy.

8

Among a mountain of messy papers

A stapler lies still

9

A man ponders the stapler

what to think

only that its job

is to seal papers

10

Click

The sound of marriage

The honeymoon

Is the teacher’s desk

11

A pen and a pencil

Are one.

A pen and a pencil and a stapler

Are one.

12

Among papers, pencils, and other things

silently sitting is the solemn stapler

still and motionless, it sits

13

Loose paper flying all around

Trying to find each other

Trying to become one

But at last they are lined up

Binding to each other with one quick staple

14

Conjoining sheets that have no interest in each other

Pierces through them for all eternity

Like pasta at a wedding

15

Among the aisles of office supplies

lies the stapler

the lone predator of the cubical-classroom universe

ready to sink its teeth into

unsuspecting victims

they say paper beats rock

I say stapler conquers all.

With great respect to Wallace Stevens and a shout out to Jim Carroll