Panel Issues Guide to Using Copyrighted Material in the Classroom

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

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When professors want to incorporate clips from television shows or other popular-culture works into their lectures and are unsure about what they can legally use, some are basing their decisions on "urban folklore about copyright," says Peter A. Jaszi, a law professor at American University.

A new guide by the university's Center for Social Media offers free legal advice to clarify such issues—and its authors say that the "fair use" provisions of copyright law are more permissive than many professors may think.

The guide, to be released today, is called "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media-Literacy Education." The center created the guide over the course of 10 meetings that involved more than 150 educators, and it was reviewed by a panel of lawyers who are experts in fair use—the doctrine that allows people to reproduce portions of copyrighted works for purposes like teaching or scholarship.

Mr. Jaszi says that some professors believe that the fair-use doctrine lays out precise limits on how much of a work can be used, such as a set number of words in a text or a fixed percentage of a film's running time. But copyright law lays out the doctrine only in broad principles, he says, and those principles—which the report sets out to explain in simple terms—have to be applied on a case-by-case basis.

The guide argues that discussion of copyright in education has too often been shaped by copyright holders, "whose understandable concern about large-scale copyright piracy has caused them to equate any unlicensed use of copyright material with stealing." The authors say they hope their work will help professors understand their rights better under current law.

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit group whose members include associations for the motion-picture and recording industries, said several of the companies he talks to are happy to grant professors permission to use their works in educational settings. He acknowledged, however, that many media companies "simply don't have—in this tight economy—the resources to be as responsive as they'd like to be."

Mr. Ross said he had not yet read the guide, but he agreed that there are some clear cases in which professors can use portions of copyrighted works without asking. "But in a lot of cases, there is no right answer," he said, because the law is open to interpretation. "There are situations where we really don't know if it's fair use or not."

Mr. Ross has proposed that professors join together to create a wiki, or Web site that can be jointly edited, where they collect their requests for permission to use copyrighted work. That would make it easier for media companies to have one place to check for requests and make their answers public.

"If you have 200 professors all looking for the similar use for one owner, they could send one query instead of 200," Mr. Ross said. "It would significantly reduce the transaction cost built into our permission systems."

Will a misstep on copyright in the classroom get you sued? "That's very, very unlikely," says the new guide. "We don't know of any lawsuit actually brought by an American media company against an educator over the use of media in the educational process."