Fair use of a copyrighted work consists of using it for a limited and transformative purpose. This doesn't mean that we can make copies of an entire book or code and give it to our students because we are teaching and we have an excuse (that doesn't sound fair, does it?). So, there are some aspects to keep in mind that limit this label of fair use:

These guidelines give room for interpretation (refer to http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/), but if we keep them in mind, (for example, just use short clips from a video, something like 10 percent, and keep it private in your Moodle course and do not publish it, for example, on YouTube), it will almost certainly qualify as fair use. I can't personally guarantee this because I'm not a judge; I just know these guidelines and follow my common sense. For example, because the course Music for everyday life is freely accessible on the Web, I avoided using copyrighted works in this way. There are copyright charts produced by several organizations with more specific guidelines, such as http://www.halldavidson.net/copyright_chart.pdf, that can be helpful. Also, watch the videos Copyright: Forever Less One Day at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4 and A Fair(y) Use Tale at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo about this issue.

Bear in mind that we can always ask the copyright owner if we can use his or her work in a specific context. This can take time but if we really want to use a substantial part of the work, this is the safest way to do it.

This is something that we can discuss with our students, as they too will be using other people's works to make their own. This can raise issues of social justice, the nature of creativity as an incremental process, and why some things should be free no matter what.

We can use any work that is in the public domain without obtaining the permission of the original author or copyright owner. A work qualifies as being in the public domain when the following conditions are satisfied:

We can find works in the public domain in Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org) and the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org). All of the classical music before the 19th century is in the public domain, and all of the works published in the United States before 1928 (as of 2013) also qualify. In one of the activities in our course that we saw in Chapter 3, Sound and Music, classical music examples that fitted this categorization were used.

There is a nice comic book about these two concepts, Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW, that you should take a look at.

Source: Aoki, K., Boyle, J. & Jenkins, J. (2006). Bound by law?. Retrieved on February 17, 2009 from http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics

Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) is a nonprofit corporation whose mission is to make it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others. For this, it has created a set of licenses that provide authors with standardized permissions that they can attach to their digital works, informing users of the author's work on what they can and cannot do with this work.

With the possibilities of digital media, it's easier for everyone to remix and create something new from the work of others. If we depended on author permissions or fair use rules, the process would be slower (as we saw, if no license is associated to a work, we have to assume that a work is an All rights reserved work, with all of the restrictions inherent to this). Creative Commons is a way of accelerating the process.

Creative Commons licenses are used quite a lot on the Web today, being applied to blogs, websites, photos, or videos, just to name a few examples.

There are four permissions that are contained in Creative Commons licenses:

So we can license, for example, a worksheet that we created for a class with an Attribution-NonCommercial license, which would only restrict the sale of this worksheet if a profit is involved. We would, in this case, attach the logo for this particular license to the work, as shown in the following screenshot:

We should also add a link to the license, for example, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0.

The course Music for everyday life was licensed in this way using a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You will notice the logo and link in the footer of the course.

To select a Creative Commons license for our work (this also means our students), we can go to http://creativecommons.org/choose and create the license that we want to use, and then add the license to the multimedia work (for example, either in the page where our work will be made available or at the end of a movie).

Again, bear in mind that if we don't attach any license to our works, this means it will be considered by law as an All rights reserved work. In this case, we might want to add our contact information to the work so that others can contact us and ask for specific permissions to re-use it.

There are other licenses that we can use while making our works available for others to build upon, such as the GNU Free Documentation License—a license by the Free Software Foundation, as used in Wikipedia. This is a copyleft license, meaning that derivative works should keep the same license. The GPL (General Public License) has the same concept, but specifically applies to software.

In a digital world, referencing the sources that we use in our works is fundamental not just from an ethical perspective but also to inform others of where we found the sources, so that they can find them easily too and use them if they wish. In a way, a reference is a link and can be used to find something that we found interesting or inspiring.

There are several ways to reference a source using different standards defined by institutions such as the APA (American Psychological Association). To cite a podcast, for example, made by me and my editors about writing a book without burning out, that was made available at http://musicforeverydaylife.net on Sept 1 and accessed the next day on the same web page, I would write the following reference:

Fenandes, J., Dewani, R., Dixit, R., Khambatta, R., and Nair, A. (Feb 1, 2013). Writing a book without burning out – tips and techniques. Retrieved Sept 2, 2013, from http://musicforeverydaylife.net.

Plagiarism can become hard to detect in multimedia content. Previously, in exclusively textual works, we could copy an excerpt of the work and Google it to see if there were similar texts on the Web. With music, voice, or video, this can't be done so easily (tags can help, though) and as much as the activities that we design for our students are meaningful and extremely interesting, deadlines can lead to students plagiarizing other people's work. Discussing this from time to time, communicating expectations, making consequences clear, encouraging oral presentations of their work, and questioning them on how they developed their ideas can minimize this.

There are some places to go and ask for further advice on copyright issues: