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Copyright is a legal protection afforded the creators of original literary and artistic works.13 When including copyrighted materials in your speeches—such as reproductions of charts or photographs, a downloaded video clip, and so forth—you must determine when and if you need permission to use such works. For information on integrating media (such as downloaded videos and sound recordings) into your speech while respecting the laws of copyright, see Chapter 22, “A Brief Guide to Microsoft PowerPoint.”
When a work is copyrighted, you may not reproduce, distribute, or display it without the permission of the copyright holder.14 For any work created from 1978 to the present, a copyright is good during the author’s lifetime, plus fifty years. After that, unless the copyright is extended, the work falls into the public domain, which means anyone may reproduce it. Not subject to copyright are federal (but not state or local) government publications, common knowledge, and select other categories.
An exception to the prohibitions of copyright is the doctrine of fair use, which permits the limited use of copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of scholarship, criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, or research.15 This means that when preparing speeches for the classroom, you have much more latitude to use other people’s creative work without seeking permission, but with credit in all cases, including display of the copyright symbol (©) on any copyrighted handouts or visual aids you include in your speech. Different rules apply to the professional speaker, whose use of copyrighted materials is considered part of a for-profit “performance.” (For more information, see www.copyright.gov.)
Creative Commons is an organization that allows creators of works to decide how they want other people to use their copyrighted works. It offers creators six types of licenses, three of which are perhaps most relevant to students in the classroom: attribution (lets you use the work if you give credit the way the author requests); noncommercial (lets you use the work for noncommercial purposes only); and no derivative works (lets you use only verbatim—exact—versions of the work).
The rules of fair use apply equally to works licensed under Creative Commons and the laws of copyright. Student speakers may search the Creative Commons Web site for suitable materials for their speech at creativecommons.org. Note that the rules for copyright, Creative Commons, and fair use also apply equally to print and online sources.