Know your ‘Copyright’

Toni Rose Princess R. Nicer

Despite the pandemic crisis, learning must continue, and by doing so, the Department of Education (DepEd) has developed the MELC or the most essential learning competencies.

It is a simplified primer that reduces the most essential learning competencies per learning at 60% compared to the usual curriculum guides. MELC, in this relation, set forth the development and reproduction of different original and contextualized learning activity sheets (LAS).

In writing or developing LAS, copyright infringement must be a prime consideration. Copyright infringement is the use or production of copyright-protected material without the permission of the copyright holder. Copyright infringement means that a third party breaches the rights afforded to the copyright holder, such as the exclusive use of a work for a set period.

Music and movies are two of the most well-known forms of entertainment that suffer from significant copyright infringement amounts.

Infringement cases may lead to contingent liabilities, which are amounts set aside in case of a possible lawsuit.

Essentially, teachers need to consider originality and honesty when creating their learning resource materials to prevent themselves from copyright infringement issues to be dealt with by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines.

Having originality is a must; this includes original creation like ideas, music composition, stories, poems, and the like that we usually use in developing learning materials. A statement inspired or extracted by another vision of a person, organization, group, or entity may be deemed original once translated into another form. Scripts of a drama or play, speeches, and quotations are just some examples and are copyrightable.

We can put honesty by saying that it is all about giving credits to the original owner of the item or character, putting them in the in-text citation and footnote, sources/ references page, or the bibliography. Any person citing the copyright holder by authority, remuneration, or simple acknowledgment indicates honesty and not subject to copyright infringement.

On a lighter note, there are photographs and other objects labeled “Fair use,” where the creator promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances, like for historical or educational pur poses.

Materials labeled ‘fair use’can be used freely without asking for consent. Some examples of websites providing fair use are google.com, unsplash.com, flickr.com, and gettyimages.com; we need to remember that we should avoid taking photos from news agencies because they file lawsuits.

However, to avoid copyright issues, teachers may shoot original photos or draw original illustrations.

Although putting in original work is quite demanding for teachers nowadays, pays off once copyrighted and labeled under your name.

--oOo-The at Capulong Elementary School

author is Teacher

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