Assignment #6

Objectives:	Research copyright law
	Site evaluation
	Report on findings and techniques

The web is big... really big. Google claims to have indexed more than 11 billion web pages. I have read estimates that there are more than 550 billion web pages (most are not available to the public), and the number doubles every 18 months. Finding information is not hard, because there is so much out there. The real problem is finding useful information.

In this assignment, I want you to do some research on the web, and document how you did that research. The research topic is "Copyright Law".

Find information on the web about copyright law, especially how it pertains to the education environment. When you start dealing with web content used for your classes, this is one of the first things you'll need to know.

Explain what you find by creating a web page with links to the information that you found on the web. On your page, give a summary of what each web site says about copyright law. Explain why you consider each site to be an "authority" on this topic. Each site should have a report like the following:

Site Title	Fair Use - US Copyright Office
URL	http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
Site Summary	I don't really want to summarize this site, because it's a critical site in the whole "fair use" issue. You should write a short paragraph on each site you find, and tell what particular issue the site addresses in copyright law.
Authority	Here you need to explain why a person should consider this site as a valued resource, or why the site should not be considered at all. The site I have selected is produced by the US government. These people make, interpret and enforce copyright law. For this reason, they are the ultimate authority in this matter. If I were looking at a WordPress blog, created by a high school student, I would have to somehow decide if the content is true or false. The site may have a bias one way or the other. Two sites could have opposite takes on the same subject. A site about smoking would have different content if it were written by the American Cancer Society versus a cigarette manufacturer. Explain any biases your selected sites may have.

To complete this assignment, you will need to find ten "copyright law" resources. Your topics will include the basics of copyright (what it means, how it is obtained, how long it lasts), fair use, public domain and Creative Commons. Create a table (as shown above) for each resource and list the Title, URL, Summary and Authority. Each listing should be in a table just like the example above. Use a border or color to separate each listing from the others. Place all of this information on one web page and create a link from your "Main" page to this new page.

Look at the picture below, and tell me if it's legal to do what I'm doing with this comic strip.
Using standard HTML, I can use a picture from another site on my site.

I did not copy it to one of my web folders, I just "linked" to it. It is as if I created a window on my page that "looks" at a picture on another web site. Is this legal according to the research you have documented above? Are there cases where this is legal and others where it is not? If this isn't legal, is there something more that I can do to make it legal?