The Book of Laminations

Faced with a problem, a middle school proposes a low-tech solution

By Carrie Russell -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2006

We have 60 copies of a book that we’d like to use with approximately 300 students. Since there aren’t enough texts for each student, our teachers would like to remove the books’ pages and laminate them. The students would then use erasable markers to record their answers, and when they’re finished, they’d wipe each page clean so the next class could use them. I’ve tried to call the publisher, but I keep getting put off by them, and the people that I’ve talked to are split on this subject. What’s your advice? —David Hefner, librarian, Ni River Middle School, Spotsylvania, VA

This activity sounds fair to me unless you suspect that the teachers are doing this to avoid purchasing more books for their students. I would be concerned if the teachers completely stopped buying the required books for their classes, and found a way to work around that by making laminated pages and reusing them year after year. The reason this is problematic, obviously, is the negative effect it would have on the work’s market.

One of our teachers wants to give her students copies of a transcript of a news interview that she found online. She also wants to download an accompanying video clip and use an LCD projector to display the transcript during her lesson. Is she breaking the law? —Nadine Roys, library media specialist, Lakewood Middle School, Lakewood, WA

Both of these activities are lawful. Creating multiple copies of a work to distribute to students for classroom use is an exemplar of fair use—it’s one of the examples that Congress includes as fair in Section 107 of the copyright law. The fair-use argument is also bolstered by the fact that this particular work is a news story. There’s more latitude under the law to use works that are factual and news oriented. Section 110 allows copyrighted materials to be displayed in the classroom, so it’s fine to use the transcript and the video clip.

We’re going to be purchasing SmartBoards for all of our classrooms. One of the things we plan to use them for is to project and play our audiovisual resources. However, the ideal format to use with SmartBoards is an MPEG-2 file, which can be stored on our server and accessed by our faculty to use with their students. Is it legal to convert our AV collection into MPEG-2 files? —Jen Fukutaki, librarian, St. Thomas School, Medina, WA

The copyright law does not provide a blanket exemption that allows libraries to convert one format into another. However, there are instances when it’s fine to make discreet, individual reproductions of materials according to the fair-use guidelines or the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act. Since you’ll be using the materials in a nonprofit, school setting to meet educational objectives and the use has no negative effect on the work’s market (in fact, your library has lawfully purchased the DVDs), the use is a fair one. The TEACH Act’s exemptions may also apply if your institution meets the following conditions: it has a formal copyright policy; the copyrighted educational materials are available to students and teachers; and there are technological protection mechanisms in place that reasonably protect the copyrighted materials from being copied or distributed beyond the classroom. In your case, the last condition has already been met since the only people to have direct access to the MPEG-2 files will be teachers.

That said, I offer a caveat: Only those DVDs that are requested for use in the classroom should be converted to the MPEG-2 format. That’s the only way you can honestly attest to the fact that the materials are being converted solely for classroom use. By the way, Congress felt it was important enough to detail in the law that classroom uses are the exceptions—so we should only convert materials when the educational goals absolutely require it.