The first week's readings were dealing with "Information Search, Netiquette, and Copyright". In my opinion it was a very interesting and furthermore important topic to be informed about, as we as students in today's business environment can almost not interact, work, communicate, or research without making use of the Internet. Especially the topic of "Copyright" caught my attention, as I have not been taught anything about this before.
Basically everything can be copyrighted: books, plays, music, movies, pictures and every form an idea takes. A Copyright is a law, which permits the owner of it to exclusively use his material/work. Any other person that wants to utilize this material either needs to request permission from the copyright owner to use it, or has to retrieve the material from a public domain, where everyone has access to it anyways.
If you are a student, scholar, or educator preparing a multimedia project or you use material for commentary, parody, news reporting, or research, you can use a legal defense called "Fair Use" whenever a copyright owner claims infringement. However, this is no exception from the legal obligation to respect copyrights, it only prevents you from being sued when you can proof that you used copyrighted material according to the following four rules:
- "The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit, educational purposes." (So when you profit from using this material, this may not be considered "fair use".)
- "The nature of the copyrighted work"; namely if it is purely factual material, the usage of it may be more considered as "fair" than if you use someone's creative work.
- "The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted protected work as a whole", which is judged individually and according to common-sense by the court.
- "The effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
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