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Articles
THE RIGHT OF ATTRIBUTION AND FAIR USE
By Monica Corton
One of the areas that is most confusing to teachers and students regarding copyright is the area of permissions. Do I or don't I need permission to use a copyrighted work in a certain situation? As you will see in the article about "Fair Use", copyright law in the United States does allow certain exceptions for the use of copyrighted works in the educational arena. The problem is that the courts frequently interpret the fair use standards in ways that are either contradictory or that are not easily understood by laymen.
In the case of educational uses, it is recommended that you should always site the source of a copyrighted work if it is used in whole or in part in your newly created work. For example, if you are using copyrighted music in your video project, you need to cite the title of the composition, the songwriter(s), the music publisher(s) of the composition, the performer(s) and the record company that owns the master (see the Music Clearance article for more information on this).
If your work takes a part of a copyrighted work, for example, if you take a photograph off the Internet and use that photograph to conceive an artistic piece either in the form of another photograph or in another art medium, you need to identify that your creative work includes elements of the original photograph and site the photographer's name. If you are on a website where it is unclear who made the photograph, then you should cite the place where you found the photograph. This allows for some kind of tracking of the owner should your work make it into the commercial world and require a formal permission to be obtained by some distributor.
The Right of Attribution or the right to receive credit is actually not covered under United States Copyright Law but by custom and practice, we identify the sources of creative works when they are utilized in whole or in part in a new work. The Right of Attribution is a very important part of supporting creative works and the people that make them.
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