primary source materials and copyright

Esther Sinofsky, chair of AECT's Copyright Task Force, has provided me with your e-mail address to which I am forwarding the following question. This was a question posed to me by another school district. I work full-time for a school system in the area of Media, ITV & Distance Learning, and, as an avocation, am a copyright law consultant. I would value a response to the following. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
Gary H. Becker
<gbecker[_at_]earthlink.net>

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My school district has a group of teachers working together to create some lessons that use primary source documents as their focus. A primary source document can be a photograph, artwork, object, artifact, oral history, diary, journal, or document, etc. Some examples are: a photograph taken circa 1930 depicting conditions during the Great Depression, or a copy of an immigration document that lists information about the immigrants as they came into Ellis Island.

Here is the first problem... they are actually using an image of the primary source document obtained from several different places. Sources include, but are not limited to: books, textbooks, periodicals, cd-roms, audio-visual kits, internet sites, etc. They are citing where they found the image... the book, the audio-visual kit, etc. (Some people had some images that they weren't sure of the source... I recommended that they not use those.)

Second problem... they then change the format to a digital image to create the worksheet for the lesson either by scanning or taking a digital photograph, I'm sure there are even some that were copied on a Xerox machine and taped into the top of the document.

Third problem... they want to post the lessons in a lesson plan database so that other teachers can have access to them. We access this large database via the internet. Received on Sun Feb 27 2000 - 12:53:36 GMT