A Visit to Copyright Bay is designed to guide you to general and specific concepts about copyright as they apply to the non-profit educational setting. The content represents the opinions of the authors based on research cited throughout this web site, not legal opinion. This page is intended to teach you how to navigate your way around.
A Visit to Copyright Bay is object-oriented.This means you use navigation icons to link to the pages covering the topics you choose to browse. If an icon is linkable the cursor will become a hand; you then click your mouse and go to the page you've chosen to visit within this web site.
The structure of A Visit to Copyright Bay is as follows.
The
image of Copyright Bay, a crescent shaped island surrounded by "Infringement
Reef" is the main menu page. At this page you click on Fair
Use Harbor and go to that site.
From
Fair Use Harbor you can visit many other sites
in the program from "clickable areas" on the map of the harbor. The labels
are fairly straightforward. When your cursor becomes a hand over the region
which is labeled (e.g., "Audio Visual Lagoon"), you click on the region
and go to a tutorial page which discusses use of copyrighted audio-visual
works in the the educational setting.
Click on a region and you visit the tutorial section which is consistently accompanied by the following image for each topic.
| The seahorse symbol will always appear to the left of a textblock which contains the content presentation of the topic chosen from Fair Use Harbor. The content will be sequenced in a series of slides, each slide accompanied by the seahorse. At the bottom of the slide you will find forward and backward arrows as well as links back to the main menu (CopyrightBay), and Fair Use Harbor. See the example below. |
backward arrow
forward
arrow
At
the bottom right corner of the last tutorial page (again, to reiterate,
signified by the seahorse at left) you will find a ship icon. The ship
icon will link you to a self-assessment quiz in the form of a game called
Shakedown Cruise. The ship icon will shift
to the upper left hand corner in the game environment. See next instruction
below.
| In the Shakedown Cruise game environment you will be presented with part of a scenario involving the fair use of copyrighted works in an educational setting. The scenario will have two or three possible outcomes. (See below). |
If you're right in your selection you'll see a happy clam. It may even give you a gift.
If you're wrong... well. We just don't want to talk about that.
If you're really, really wrong, though... you may have to face.....
And, believe me, you don't want any of them. Unless, you click on the right answer which, in some instances, will result in a "Metaphor" getting its comeuppance. We promise you the result will be melodramatic in any event.
(By the way, see the note about "ambiguity" Or read on; you'll eventually find this note.)
From time to time you may encounter an 
in
your travels.
Whenever you see this anchor, click on it and it will take you to a reference to support whatever documentation is cited. In essence it will link you to our bibliography which goes to support any of a myriad of positions on copyright. Keep in mind though that it's all just opinion, not legal advice.
Finally,
whenever you encounter the lady with the scales of justice, you can rest
assured that the commentary you are reading is a matter of opinion and
is not to be construed as legal advice. It is only opinion based on
the authors' best efforts to research the subject matter at hand.
Occasionally during the Shakedown Cruise there will be no clear-cut answer to a question, only ambiguity. Sue Bennett, Ph.D., Professor of English at New Mexico Junior College, Hobbs, NM, put it this way:"Sometimes I wasn't sure if I had the 'right' answer, realizing eventually that sometimes there wasn't a 'right' answer."This interpretation of certain outcomes in the Shakedown Cruise is exactly correct. Copyright can be such a murky situation that, all too frequently, the "best" answer is the ambiguous one. Many of our answers are clear; but some are not. On such occasions our purpose is to provoke critical analysis in hopes that this process will lead to reasonable judgments about fair use; our role is not to be the oracle of copyright law.(Go back to where you left off after you've read this.)
Naturally, there will be links
throughout the web site at the bottom of tutorial and outcomes pages so
that you can link back to the main menu or to Fair
Use Harbor in order to resume your tour of Copyright Bay.
One other thing, not every page contains a convenient back arrow. If you click on the bibliography, legal disclaimer or any other non-tutorial page, you will need to rely on the reverse key or back arrow of your browser (e.g., "Netscape") to return to where you left off.
We hope you enjoy your visit! You may begin your voyage at the bottom of this page.
The authors.