Scenario

A school district purchases the Teacher’s Editions, Assessment booklet, and a Workbook, for the elementary editions of the Houghton-Mifflin Science series.  The teacher’s edition is for teacher reference and background material.  The students lack the necessary background knowledge in science to understand and gain understanding of many of the concepts without materials to read, charts to analyze, and pictures to see.  The teacher makes a copy of a few pages in the teacher’s edition to help the students with the necessary background knowledge.

The students are studying animal classification.  The book offers important information, a list and a chart on the hierarchy of animal classification.  The teacher copies 2 of the 5 pages in the chapter, so that the students have a reference and model of how animals are classified (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species).  Once the assignment is through the teacher collects the copies from the students. 

Throughout the year the teacher begins to copy more and more of the teacher’s edition for the students and eventually puts together a packet of pages to be referred to at various times throughout the year.  Entire chapters are never copied, but the students end up with a good portion of the book to refer to when needed.

Issue

It seems that at first the teacher is following the fair use laws by only copying small portions of the book and then collecting them when the unit of study is complete.  When the teacher then begins copying larger sections of the work and putting together the packets for reference material, the teacher is going into a very grey area.  This is probably infringement on copyright laws.  The copies are no longer made spontaneously, and the students now have the pages in an anthology to refer to.