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A Maryland school board has put on hold the consideration of a policy that would strip students and teachers of the copyright ownership of their own works, a policy journalism advisers in the district said they had concerns over.
A recent dispute involving a student photographer and a popular 5K organization reached a settlement over the weekend, after the student’s crowdfunding campaign to offset the costs of a pending lawsuit generated outcry online. Florida Atlantic University student Maxwell William Jackson said The Color Run exploited his work after he willingly provided images for use on Facebook in exchange for photo credit.
These directions will help you register a yearbook using the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO).
The Texas school district that has asked students in the yearbook class to sign a work-for-hire agreement maintains the policy's legality, despite widespread skepticism.
A student was removed from his position as editor of his university’s paper after selling a video he captured of police pepper-spraying students during an on-campus brawl.
Students and administrators frequently misunderstand copyright law and how it relates to student work, often leading to conflicts in schools.
Links to sites that offer downloadable images and music licensed for reuse
In 2015, Mazur, then a student at Flower Mound (Texas) High School, was ordered by his school administration to take down a Flickr page where he was selling school sports photos to parents. Months later, the school required all members of the yearbook class to sign an agreement that the district owns the copyright to any work they produce.
The SPLC’s lawyers frequently lecture about the doctrine of “fair use,” and how – properly applied – it can enable journalists to sample lawfully from copyright-protected content.
We have had several students contact us regarding their use of news media photos to include with their newspaper or yearbook coverage of the Haitian earthquake. As usual, the general rule for using copyrighted material applies: If you didn't take the photo and/or you don't own the copyright to it, you must first obtain permission, which sometimes requires paying for a license.
If you’re contemplating wearing your favorite Saints T-shirt to a Super Bowl party, make sure there aren’t any NFL lawyers invited first. That’s because the NFL has decided to commit the 21st century’s defining example of corporate shark-jumping by threatening to sue its fans.
Don't say that we didn't warn you: Copyright can be strong, strong medicine. Try "$750 per song" strong. For all of the thousands of Internet users who skate by unpunished for posting episodes of "Lost" or "The Daily Show" on YouTube, there's the occasional Whitney Harper to remind us that "everybody's doing it" won't get you out of a speeding ticket, and it won't get you off the hook for downloading copyright-protected music without paying for it either. Whitney was a 14-year-old Texas eighth-grader when she started using what was at the time a music file-sharing site, KaZaA (now operating as a paid subscription service) to download and share songs.
The Attorney General of Tennessee recently opined that the SEC was within its rights to limit media access to college sporting events to those news organizations who were willing to sign away large sections of their intellectual property rights as part of a credentialing scheme. It’s a neat idea, and I’m sure it would be expedient for the SEC if the world really did work that way, but I’m afraid the Attorney General’s opinion raises more copyright questions than it answers—not the least of those questions being whether the SEC’s credentialing scheme is actually preempted by federal copyright law. Preemption is a doctrine that says, when there’s a disagreement between state laws and federal laws, the federal law wins.
In 2007, Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube, seeking a billion dollars in damages for the infringement of Viacom copyrghts in videos uploaded to YouTube by third-party users. On Wednesday, a federal district judge granted YouTube summary judgment, saying the claims were barred by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
For better or worse, knowledge of the law continues to be an ever-growing part of the skill set required of all journalists, including students. One fairly quick -- and mostly painless/sometimes entertaining -- way to check how much your students/staff know about media law as they head back to the newsroom is to direct them to the SPLC's Test Your Knowledge of Student Media Law quiz series.
Who owns the copyright to work created by a student journalist? It’s a fascinating, important — and potentially complicated question.
High school football games are played on publicly subsidized fields, and organized by publicly salaried coaches and athletic directors.
America is approaching a grim anniversary that is no cause for celebration -- 10 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and many journalistic organizations, including campus ones, will be looking for the right images from the tragedy to accompany their coverage. This is an excellent reminder that, while journalists should always assume that material they find online is copyright-protected property and may not be indiscriminately reused, the Internet does offer some copyright-safe refuges. The first is material created by federal government employees as part of their employment.
In the everything's-free, share-and-share-alike culture of the Web, it often comes as a surprise and a disappointment to students that celebrity photos on news organizations' websites are valuable copyright-protected property. Students want to talk and write about Rihanna and Li'l Wayne and (for some unearthly reason) Kim Kardashian, and they need illustrations to accompany their stories.
On occasion, people in positions of public authority know "just enough law to be dangerous" -- not enough to actually get the answer right, but enough to convince themselves that they have, because the answer has lots of authoritative-sounding words in it. This is the story of one such occasion. Recently, the SPLC attorney hotline received what started out as an unremarkable call from a college journalist whose request to a government agency for public records was denied.