Students' Knowledge of the U.S. Copyright & Fair Use
When I began teaching the U.S. copyright & fair use back in 2011, I quickly realized that students had a lot of false information about the U.S. copyright and fair use. I originally thought it would be enough to bring up the topic occasionally throughout the semester, but giving them a pre-test on the U.S. copyright and fair use at the beginning of the semester said otherwise. Here, I present the data accumulated from 541 students in the period of 2012-2017.
Pre-Test Questions
The pre-test consists of 15 questions, 7 of which are about the U.S. copyright and 8 are about fair use. I cannot share the exact questions here to prevent my prospective students from finding out these questions, but I will list the topic of each question below. ※Please contact me to obtain the actual questions.
U.S. CopyrightQ1: the US Constitution
Q2: the US Government Q3: Six exclusive rights Q4: Lifespan Q5: Copyrighting your work Q6: Copyrighting your work Q7: Penalties |
Fair UseQ8: Four factors
Q9: Cases/actions that favor or oppose fair use Q10: Case #1 - Spontaneous use Q11: Case #2 - Repeated use Q12: Case #3 - The first requirement Q13: Case #4 - Amount Q14: Case #5 - Showing a movie in the classroom Q15: Case #6 - Copying a DVD |
Item Statistics
Below are some of the data obtained from the pre-test. ※Please contact me to see the full results.
U.S. Copyright
Q5 & Q6 - How to copyright your work
For Q5, of all 541 students, the surprising 58% thought they had to register with the copyright office in order to copyright their own work (see Figure 1). This result was consistent across all the 24 course sections that I taught between 2012 and 2017. When the question was worded in a slightly different manner with different answer options in Q6, the surprising 37% still thought that the copyright notation with © was necessary to copyright their own work. This result was consistent across 22 course sections. Both answers are of course incorrect. The correct answers are shown in green in the below pie charts.
What does this imply about our students? This may be one of the reasons why the majority of our students think they could freely use someone's creative work that has no copyright notation as long as they give credit to the author. By giving credit to the author, students avoided plagiarizing, but copyright is a completely separate matter. The majority of our students do not make a clear distinction between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Students understand what plagiarism is and its academic implications possibly because they have been trained to avoid plagiarism in school, but they tend to unknowingly violate copyright quite frequently. I urge school teachers and college professors to teach their students at least the basics of copyright and fair use.
Fair Use
Q9 & Q14 - Showing a movie in a classroom
One of the big misconceptions that many students have and even some teachers have is that they think it is okay to show any movie in its entirety in a classroom. Of all 541 students, while 66% of the students thought that it would oppose fair use when the purpose was exclusively stated as entertainment (Figure 3), when the question was slightly rewarded in a different manner (i.e., unrelated to the subject), the surprising 79% of the students said it would actually support fair use (Figure 4). When I asked my students why they thought it was okay to show a movie in the classroom even though the movie had nothing to do with the course content, their answers were always that their teachers had done it many times in their K-12 education. Our students have been misguided by their teachers, who in turn had been misguided by their teachers. The cycle of wrong practices needs to stop. Even though showing fun movies in class can be a motivational factor for students, teachers must make sure that there is a strong connection between the movie and the course content.
Q9, Q16 & Q17 - Using web images
Students often download and use the copyrighted pictures for their school projects and assignments. The problem is that they often unintentionally obtain the pictures illegally. Students' answers to Q9 (see Figure 5) reveal that a little less than half the students (46%) think that if the picture they want is sold by the photo-selling website and they don't want to buy it from the website, they can just get it from some website that uses the same picture (the website owner supposedly purchased it from the photo-selling website). Interestingly, 59% of the students think that it is illegal to download and use the preview pictures from the photo-selling website (Figure 6).
Many students have the fraudulent idea that it is okay to download and use pictures for free as long as they do not download them from the photo-selling website. Many students also think that this issue can be taken care of as long as they cite the sources of the pictures. The truth is that by citing the sources they took care of the plagiarism issue, but still violated the copyright. Teachers must make sure that their students will take both plagiarism and copyright into consideration when using web images.
More Findings
If you are interested in seeing the full results, please contact me.