Handling Copyright Issues

I agree with both Amanda and Katlin that education about copyright issues will probably (hopefully) reduce incidents of copyright. Since my students would not be doing research papers, they may have less chance to violate copyright laws in my classroom.

While plagirism and copyright are separate issues, I feel that they can be dealt with similar ways. First, prevention is key. This includes telling students what copyright violation and plagirism is and what use of other's work is acceptable and what is not. Also, projects and assignments should not be conducive to copyright violations. For instance, it seems that most fair use violations would be committed by the teacher and not the student. For instance, if you copy a complete poem for the students to analyze (and for some reason it is not fair use) and distribute to the students, then you have really violated copyright law and not the students.

However, if it cannot be prevented, teachers need to be prepared to deal with such offenses. This offenses should not be treated lightly- as in most cases it will constitute not only copyright infringement but cheating. Depending on the situation, I think it would be appropriate to either give the student a 0 for the project or give them an imcomplete until they have redone the project that does not violate such copyright. In either case, the student needs to be fully aware of what they did wrong and why what they did was wrong.