I have had the most unfortunate consequence of being the stage manager for a show that was cancelled due to changes being made that were not approved by a copyright holder. It was one of the hardest moments of my life. We had 8 of the cutest girls in the world and for a majority of them, it was their first time at the community theatre I was volunteering at. These girls had put their heart and souls into this production, coming to every call, even when they weren't worked with on several occasions. The director of the show had decided to cut parts of songs out, change scenes around, change iconic phrases, and all the while telling everyone he had the copyright holder's permission. He thought that since we lived in such a small community he could get away with it, that no one would tell a big company in New York what a small little town was doing. He was wrong, dead wrong. It literally became headline news, he resigned and moved on, but that was a very big issue, the theatre, according to contract, the fines could have literally destroyed this extremely old group that had been around for 70+ years, and why? Because someone changed a work, which is basically using someones intellectual property without the correct permissions.
The ISTE Standards for 2016 has seven core areas, 1) Empowered Learner, 2) Digital Citizen, 3) Knowledge Constructor, 4) Innovative Designer, 5) Computational Thinker, 6) Creative Communicator, and 7) Global Collaborator. Today I am going to focus on Digital Citizen, 2c: demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.
Having had a career outside of teaching in the past, I have worked for fortune 500 corporations, I have been a paralegal in a corporate office, general law office, and even a bit of family and real estate practice. I had two areas of law that I actually studied quite a bit and still keep up with and those are ip and criminal law (ip is intellectual property for those not in the know). Intellectual property law when it comes to the digital world is really still in its infancy, I honestly think that putting a jury of "peers" or a judge who may not know anything about how technology works is extremely bad for these cases. There are instances where code is considered "copyrighted" and thus an "ip" and then is not used for years and when someone else comes up with this very simple code a patent troll strikes, but that is another topic for a completely other blog. What my goal here today is to help some of my fellow theatre teachers out with avoiding any pesky legal issues regarding this copyright issues.
First I would like to say that just doing a random google search for pictures or sounds is a huge way to get in a world of trouble. Even if you use an enhanced google search feature for images and click on a choice, for instance "Labeled for reuse with modification" you may still have restrictions and may be violating someone's intellectual property by not giving them a proper citation in the program for the use of the picture used.
I picked president Obama because, well he is so photogenic for one, and tons of people have pictures of him. In the screen shot below I chose the "Labeled for reuse with modification" option. If you notice it is actually from a .gov site. 17. U.S. Code § 105 - Subject matter of copyright: Untied States Government works basically states that if this work was created by the US Government, it is practically public domain, so the US Government is a great source for getting pictures and such that you are free to alter and use how you want.
While a free picture from good ole' Uncle Sam is good for you, keep in mind that you might still want to give credit in a program and such if you are using the image. If you can actually get who took the picture, you should give them credit, however you are not actually required by law to credit works that are in the public domain because they are not copyrighted. There is a catch though, you do still need to worry about claims of plagiarism, so it is always best to state that if a particular image was used, that it was acquired and cite the source, especially if you manipulated the image in any fashion. Take for example the changes I made of the picture below.
I ran this through an artificial intelligence program that emulates a Van Gogh style drawing. I would want to state that this picture was "Modified from the original source from Pete Souza using Corel Painter Essentials" to avoid any issues of plagiarism and trying to pass this off as my own and not only that, but identifying the program I used as well. Basically, I still couldn't be sued, but it would look bad at a professional level, and trust me you don't want that on your portfolio. I know that some of you looking at this are like "the town I teach in has less than 1,000 people in it, why should I care?" The reason you should care is your students will reflect to the world what you taught them. If your students go out and make fools of themselves in mass, then it will definitely reflect on you and your program.
I recently designed a bunch of animated slides for a production of the musical "A Year of Toad and Frog" and it was a blast. I was very careful in selecting what I used, for the most part, I took old landscape paintings that were considered public domain and took pictures of them or acquired pictures that were public domain marked online for use. I ran them through a water color AI program to reconstruct them a bit, then I added some slight motion in them to make them move a little. It worked out quite successfully. However, there are other licenses that are royalty free you can use in most cases. That licensing is called Creative Commons licensing. There are 7 types of licensing, the two I work with the most are CC0 (literally public domain) and CC-BY which allows you to edit to your heart's content as long as the item you make is setup as CC-BY itself and you attribute the original creator. You can click on a link for all of the explanations of all 7 types. You will find that even if you pay for the use of Creative Commons item that it is often not nearly as expensive as going through these big companies that have to pay for their fancy New York building's rent.
Another source I like to do is buy sound bundles that come royalty free. Sure it is generic music and SFX, but guess what, I am not getting sued and I don't have to attribute it either. You can also get plenty of stock photos and video you can do the same with. I use the site Stack Social to purchase various software and stock music/pictures/sfx/video bundles. Most of these come with commercial usage rights and are not terribly expensive. I would definitely rather spend $20 on 5GB of stock items that I may only like 1/10 of the product than have to pay the fine for violating copyright for just one show.
Of course the only way to be 100% sure that you aren't going to have a copyright issue is to create the work yourself. You can create your own sound effects, pictures for projections and even animations by using various devices and software. A good microphone (any condenser microphone, Blue Snowball or Yeti, and various Samson microphones) can be acquired on the cheap if you know how to search for them. Creating sounds isn't as hard as you may think and the software Audacity is open source and free and I know professional people who use it for editing from home (voice actors and radio people), but if you aren't in the mood to create a sound or don't have the technical know how, you can find Creative Commons sounds as well. For video, believe it or not most cell phones, especially iPhone 6s and above actually shoot pretty decent video, you can always go up to a DSLR if you want, but most of those weren't meant for video (though the Sony A6100 and up series does a great job with video too). The problem with these devices though is that the sound quality can be a bit sketchy without getting an external microphone, and on the iPhone8 and above that requires using the lightning to 3.5mm adapter which becomes tricky if you are shooting video and your battery is not fully charged and even then, if you are shooting over 2 hours, you have to disconnect the microphone to get it to charge. Even for the DSLR's it is a bit rough as you have to use a 3.5mm jack on most of them. I have an a6000 which has to have a special adapter for an external microphone, so trust me when I say if you are going that route, start with an A6100, it is the A6000 with a 3.5mm jack.
When discussing this with students, I would suggest you don't sugar coat it. You can find stories about ip infringement, I mean, just try and upload a video on youtube with a popular song on it, you will get a notice that it either can't be uploaded due to the copyright on the song or you can post it without moneytization available to the video. That is a really good real world experience you can show them in the classroom. It is actually a felony in some respects, that US code in front of movies is not a joke. Grant it, most of the time those suits are settled before ever going to court, so you won't hear about them, but people who download music or movies and share them in torrenting and such get hit with heavy and life crushing fines imposed on them by over zealous corporate lawyers. Most of these suits never make it to trial, but there are a few who have.
I leave you with a list of sites you can use to find art and sounds that are licensed either public domain or creative commons. Be sure if you are using the creative commons search you are using the advanced features to avoid anything you can't change or might have to pay to use.
Creative Commons Search Engine
5 Websites to Find Creative Commons Videos - now this one is a list of 5 sites, it includes Vimeo and YouTube. Please keep in mind that some Creative Commons will require you to pay for use if you are making any changes (this includes anything, cutting part of it out, changing the volume level in the source video, etc).
Anyhow, thank you for actually making it all the way to the end. I am actually pretty passionate about this, and I am willing to bet that many of you are probably saying right now "I've pretty much done all of this without permission, yikes". Which goes back to my initial story at the start of this post. We had a director that was mad because one of the parent's didn't want to be in the play due a condition the director had. The director had offered a part to his kid thinking he would definitely take the part, and he didn't. So the director went and cast another actor that the parent hated, which didn't have the effect the director wanted it to have, so he started cutting lines for the kid's role, and parts of songs where she was supposed to be prominent. The director actually bragged about it to me, and I knew at that point I had taken up a stage management position that was going to require me to walk on a very delicate tight rope. It got to the point where the parent finally said enough was enough and reported the changes to the copyright holder. It was a big mess, but suffice it to say, this guy was actually pretty chill about the situation, especially since his daughter was being used as a tool to anger him. In short, what I am saying is that if a parent is peeved off about their kid not getting the part they thought they should get in a play, you might want to be careful if you are violating ip in any form or fashion, it is a quick way to get a huge fine, and you should train your young and upcoming technicians to do it the correct way, so you don't have to worry about fallout for petty things that could destroy your program and tarnish your district's reputation.
