LiDA100: Learning in a Digital Age

Pre-Knowledge

Things You Need to Know and Think About when Answering Questions on the Case Study

1. What copyright is and what it protects
2. The activities which copyright prohibits
3. The types of resources and materials copyright covers
4. What the public domain is and when copyright works enter the public domain
5. The duration of copyright
6. Who owns copyright, including who owns copyright in employment situations
7. The rights of authors or copyright holders.

Case Study

Completing a Digital Assignment on Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Theresa Brown, is a first-year, registered student taking a media studies course at the local university. She is preparing an assignment on Hamlet by William Shakespeare. She is required to publish the assignment online, and also to prepare a slide show with an audio summary.

The university provides a hosted website for each student in the course, but access is restricted to students who are registered to take the course via a password. Many students lack affordable internet access at home, so Theresa wants to include local copies of supporting resources she has found on the open web to download onto the website that is only accessible via the institution’s local network. 

Theresa would like to include the following resources:

1. The full text of Hamlet edited by Charles Kean who died in 1868.
2. An image of the portrait of Hamlet by William Morris Hunt (1824–1879), housed by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
3. A digital copy of the Cobbe portrait of William Shakespeare recently discovered in March 2009. (See press release from The Guardian.)
4. A copy of the BBC video that summarizes the major themes of the play.
5. Theresa has compiled a slide show with an audio summary she will host on Slideshare. Her slide show is based on her original research work drawing on a winning essay Penguin published on the Signet Essay Competition site, which is openly accessible on the web.

Requirements

We suggest you write down your answers so you can compare them with the self-assessment activities that follow. In each case, you should identify:

• Whether the resources are protected by copyright;
• Who owns the copyright; and
• In your opinion, whether Theresa can legally include copies of these materials in her course without consent or permission from the copyright holder.

This case study was inspired by ideas in the Copyright 4 Educators (ZA) course. Note that for the purposes of this case study, Theresa is a fictitious character and has not published an essay on the [Signet Essay Competition site].

Feedback and Self Assessment

On the quiz that follows you will find a copy of the case study questions with feedback and discussion on the options.