Copyright and Fine Print

SOPA 2012 Update

• Wonderful.  Another attempt to stop sharing.  You do realize "sharing" online becomes "teaching" in a classroom?  As a teacher, you find and distribute resources to students.  You and I are just the same.  We both find and distribute resources.  Just about every part of teaching involves showing or using existing copyrighted material.  (you can't use primary data sources for everything). 
• Sharing resources is part of the culture of teaching.  It's worked for decades, so why stop doing it now?  An effective teacher shares.  It's always been that way.  I used to hang around retiring teachers so I could inherit their collections of stuff.  I have a huge collection of stuff.  I am a better teacher for it.  Do I have a certificate or a registry for where each item in my collection came from?  No.  That's ridiculous.
• I don't track what you do on this site.  I don't have any cookies, Google Stats or anything going on in the background.  I have no idea what resources have been accessed or by how many people.  You don't have to sign in for anything.  I keep my Drupal security modules up to date.  No-one is taking notes.  If you really want to be super anonymous, use an anonymizer.  I don't block them.  If you want to be super-super protected, use PeerBlock and block HTTP traffic.  
• This site is hosted in the USA by DreamHost, a US company.  It meets all criteria for sharing.  If someone asks me to take a work down, it is done within a few hours.  If they go right to the top and complain that way, DreamHost removes the resource directly for me, without complaining about it.  I've been running this for 3+ years and no-one has ever got to a second state of a complaint with me.  I comply.  
• I don't mean to blow my own trumpet, but if there are a "top 50" list of people in the world who know everything about sharing digital education resources, I would be part of that list.  The government has invested a lot of money into me for this purpose.  This site is "my" version of sharing, based on what I know.  It's not part of my employment with the government.
• My advice to teachers is to comply with everything.  You really don't want to "take a stand" against any new law when you are a teacher.  That's career suicide.  Let the people like me do that for you.  It's our job.  There are a lot of people behind the scenes battling for your rights.  By all means protest as a citizen, but don't protest as a teacher.  The government pays your wages.  You can't disagree with them publicly and expect to keep your job.   And you have to appear at all times to be a model citizen, modeling good values to your students, as pointless as that sounds, and pretend you went deaf when you hear that your students are downloading movie files at home.  Don't get involved in the public debate when you are a teacher.  Just stick to teaching, your main job.  Don't hold a protest.  I am not patronizing you or belittling your own skills.  I just know that teachers and schools are very, very easy targets for media-hungry legal fanatics.  I've seen teachers become sacrificial goats for systems wanting to "blame" someone.  It will wreck your life. It might be wrong to fire a teacher, but it's easy.  And it's much, much harder for a teacher who has been fired to get their job back, even though they shouldn't have been fired in the first place.  Trust me, I know.
• "Copyright" for the public is different to "copyright" in education.  It's your job to become informed, and it's the job of people like me to inform teachers (in my jurisdiction).  You and your students might not be doing anything wrong.  Usually you are protected by law.  But that specific law isn't going to be on the nightly TV news.  You need to find that specific law through your own education jurisdiction.

Top 10 Copyright Responses

1. Calm down.
2. If you are a teacher, your government and the publishing world already knows about your need to use digital resources.  They haven't left you high and dry and without support.
3. Contact your local government support office and/or your copyright authority.  Your location will have rules about what you can and can't do with digital resources.  In Australia, check the links below. If you are in America, start somewhere like this - http://www.copyright.gov/  Sometimes there are different laws about what a teacher or a student can do.
4. Teachers have always been able to copy 10% of a work, 1 chapter or the equivalent.  No-one has really worked out how this relates to digital work, although a lot of people have ideas.  Most of the time we use common sense.  But the actual rules are confusing for digital media, because students may have to use a huge number of copies of a digital work to complete an assignment, for example finding the work on the internet again and again.  This is obviously different to using one copy of a print book.
5. Education systems ALWAYS have paid copyright owners for their work.  What normally happens is a sample of schools get audited and everything they use is documented.  The central government (not the school) then uses that sample to represent the habits of all schools.  Then they find the authors of those works and pay them copyright fees.  A LOT of money goes to copyright holders that are found in school audits.
6. As a teacher, you should try to cut down on the use of copyright works and use free work or Creative Commons licenses.  This will save your government a lot of money.
7. If you are a publisher, research how schools use your work.
8. If you don't want your resources published here, just let me know (under contacts on the right) and the work will be taken down within a day.  No problem.
9. Please note none of the resources here have been found through hacking or any illegal means.  They are already on the internet, but in places that some teachers cannot easily access from their school.  I have just put them somewhere more central.
10. If a teacher really likes a work, they can always buy it on Amazon.  A lot of education books are available at Amazon, in a used condition, from $0.01 (with a hefty postage charge).  Obviously if schools buy a used book from Amazon, the publisher and author will get less money than if teachers access it online and it is audited.  But there are always options.
     

Copyright

• Education copyright is a major issue.    Please do not deliberately post copyrighted work.  However, don't let copyright fears scare you from sharing work or posting your own ideas.
   
• Teachers, students and schools often have their own rules for accessing copyrighted works.  For example, Australian schools are audited through CAL and copyright fees are paid by education jurisdictions to the authors - for more information see http://www.copyright.com.au/Copyright_Users/Education/Education.aspx  and http://www.copyright.com.au/assets/documents/Sampling%20and%20distributi...
   
• Your school should be aware of your local copyright agreements.  It is common for schools to be allowed to copy 10% of a work, but copyright fees are still payable to the author.  Most schools do not pay these directly - the payment is often handed by the government through their copyright agency.
   
• If you are the owner of copyrighted work, and you do not want to work linked to or listed in the Teacher Syndicate, please send us an email through the CONTACT menu and the link will be deleted.
   
• Our blog entry about copyright belief is simple. Read more about it here http://www.teachersyndicate.com/ttsd/node/1633

The fine print:  there isn't much. 

• All services are paid for by the Teacher Syndicate, including hosting and bandwidth. 
   
• No part of this site is tracking your IP address, who you are or where you work. It's nothing personal, but we have better things to do.
   
• We want you to sign up for the newsletter.  We like knowing people care about our work.  You'll get a simple weekly email from us, and we won't share your details with anyone else. If you want to comment or upload a resource, you can use any email address, a pseudonym or pen name.
   
• All of our services are provided by Dreamhost.  Dreamhost is very reliable, but we might have peaks in traffic. When this happens, we give priority access to members. 
   
• Any member can link to, or upload files to share.  These uploads are not moderated or approved, however the Teacher Syndicate will manage all responses to copyright infringements when notified.
   

COPYRIGHT NOTICES

• If we are informed that a possible crime has been committed by a member (including but not limited to harassment, bullying, copyright infringement, slander), we will send you an email, with details of the person who flagged the issue.  WE DO NOT send your email details onto the person who made the complaint.  The person who made the complaint will receive an email stating:

"Thankyou for your email. We take all issues seriously.  We have contacted the member and passed on your details.  Under terms of membership in the Teacher Syndicate, we ask that the Teacher Syndicate Member review their work within 5 working days and either (a) delete the work or (b) respond directly to your email to directly mediate the issue.  If the work is matter is still unresolved after 5 working days,  the matter will be investigated by the Teacher Syndicate Staff. 

• If we receive notification from a copyright holder, the original poster of the resource will receive this message:

This is an Automated Notification from the Teacher Syndicate.

We are writing to inform you that we have received reports indicating your account was involved in allegedly illegal activity, which may include sharing of Copyright protected material without Authorization of the Copyright holder.

This email is intended to bring the matter to your attention, and provide you with the information and the opportunity to resolve the issue, Teacher Syndicate makes no accusation in regard to this notification.

If you have posted this work as a genuine mistake, please remove the work as its presence will be reviewed in 5 days and the matter escalated if needed.

Your information will not be provided to the Copyright Holder or the reporting agency unless legal proceedings require us by law to provide this information. You may however, if you wish, contact the copyright agency and advise them if you have removed the offending content from your account or computer.

The Teacher Syndicate can not offer you any advice on what action to take in this matter, if you require legal advice please consult a lawyer. If you believe you were incorrectly identified as the person sharing this material, please reply to this email.

If you have any questions or wish to dispute this notification please reply to this email, note that any replies will be kept on record and may be provided in evidence should the Copyright Owner or Agent take further legal action.

Kind Regards,
Jake Riley
admin@teachersyndicate.com