One of our teachers received a grant to buy iPods to record her reading children’s books. She plans to share the recordings with her students so they can follow along with the stories. Although audio versions of the books can be purchased from iTunes, is this a fair use?

Given the number of questions that I receive on this topic, it’s obvious that this is a common practice in K–12 schools. Plus, it’s even funded by grants, which indicates that this particular use (a public performance of reading aloud a book) is accepted as the norm, just as reading a book for storytime is the norm. Technically it’s an infringement, but the harm caused to the rights holder’s monopoly is insignificant, so no one cares. On the other hand, if an educator creates a recording that competes directly with the existing commercial recordings, then the rights holder’s interests are harmed.

It’s hard to imagine that the teacher’s recordings, which she plans to share with a small number of students who’ll listen to them individually and for purely educational purposes, could ever compete with a commercial audiobook. Plus, the teacher has no intention of selling the recordings. I contend that this use is a fair use—others may disagree. Ultimately, it’s up to you and your institution to decide how far you want to push the fair-use envelope.

Now that it’s research-paper season at our high school, some of our teachers have asked me to speak to students about copyright issues. One of the questions that keeps popping up is about YouTube. Is its content copyright free? Since YouTube’s videos are posted freely on the public Web, it seems like they would be in the public domain. Is that correct? What should I tell our teachers?

Videos on YouTube are protected by copyright law unless their creators have forfeited their rights by displaying a Creative Commons license or some other notice that the video is in the public domain. You’re absolutely right: if people choose to put their videos on a publicly accessible Web site, it stands to reason that they want others to use their works. However, it’s best to assume that nearly everything on the Web is protected by copyright law unless you know otherwise. You can tell your teachers that videos on YouTube are protected by copyright, and the same law that applies to analog works on library shelves also applies to digital materials on digital networks.

Back in the day, rights holders were required to place a copyright symbol on their works and formally register them with the United States Copyright Office. But because of changes in international and national copyright laws, that’s no longer the case. If a work is an original creation, shows a certain level of creativity, and is “fixed in a tangible medium” (such as words on a page or sounds in a recording), then it’s automatically covered by copyright. (In fact, many people refer to this as “automatic copyright.” You don’t have to do a thing to be awarded copyright protection.) And yes, even the doodles on your grocery list are protected by copyright law, which is kind of a scary thought.

Still, there are advantages to registering your creations with the U.S. Copyright Office. For one thing, if someone infringes your work, you don’t have to prove to the court that you created it. In legal-speak, you have prima facie evidence. In addition, you can collect attorney fees and statutory damages in a court proceeding if your infringed work has been registered within three months of its publication. Also, there are some excellent public policy reasons for registering your work. If somebody wants to use it and the intended use isn’t covered by a copyright exception, that person can easily locate the rights holder to seek his permission. And just think, if everybody had always been required to register their works and the Copyright Office had maintained those registrations, we wouldn’t have so many works whose copyright holders are tough or impossible to track down.