The $12,000 Tweet: A Collision at the Intersection of Social Media and Copyright Law

Context

Chasm School District is a small, rural district located in the northern part of a western state. The district has 1,500 students in eight schools: two high schools, two middle schools, two elementary schools, an alternative placement school, and one preschool. These schools serve two distinct communities that are separated by the Antler River. Bethel, the town on the west side of the river, is populated by mineral and oil extraction technicians and people who work in the many hotels and restaurants located there that serve tourists on their way to a nearby national park. Elk Camp, on the east side of the river, is home to the community college, the school district’s central office, and the county administration buildings, including the courthouse and council chambers. About 30 students live on large ranches located more than 50 miles from the nearest school and either drive themselves to school or ride on buses that are part of the extensive transportation system operated by the school district.

The district consistently scores in the “meets” or “exceeds expectations” categories on state testing and the graduation rate hovers around 85%. An equally strong point of pride for the district is that more than 80% of high school students participate in at least one extracurricular activity. The school board strongly believes in a relationship among extracurricular activities, academic achievement, and graduation rates and is willing to devote staff time and resources to maintaining a robust program of opportunities for students. Support for and attendance at games and other school events is very high and the district plays an important role as a gathering place and social center for the citizens of the two communities.

The former superintendent held the position for 7 years with solid support from the school board; however, he had received a vote of no confidence from the teachers association in the fifth year of his tenure. The teachers were concerned with what they perceived as a lack of communication, the top-down approach to curricular and schedule changes, increasingly burdensome administrative regulations, and favoritism toward the schools and parents in Elk Camp—the wealthier of the two district communities. The board had extended the superintendent’s contract the same year as the teachers’ negative vote, causing an even deeper rift between the teachers and the district administration, including the board.

The next 2 years were rocky, with continued suspicion and finger-pointing from both the teachers and the administration. When it came time for the board to consider the superintendent’s contract again, they let him know that he might want to start looking for another position. He did, was quickly hired in a different state, and quietly left town at the end of that school year.

At the election after the former superintendent left, the board underwent turnover as many in the community felt that the board should have acted on the teachers’ concerns sooner and in a more decisive manner. Aware of this sentiment, the newly elected members were focused on moving forward in a positive way with the teachers, staff, and community. Their first task was to find a new superintendent and they gave the job to Sam Groome in July 2018. Sam had been in the district for a decade, working as a school counselor and then as the well-liked principal of the high school in Elk Camp.

Sam’s experience with the district and his counseling background seemed like a good fit to help reframe internal relationships and the board chose to appoint him without conducting a national search. Sam came into the position with a bit of hesitation. Having been in the district for so long, he was well aware of the tension that had existed recently. There was distrust within the school community, and he knew that he would have to over-communicate his own ideas as well as the board’s and create some meaningful feedback loops so that the teachers would feel included and valued. He was also aware that, because no formal search had been conducted, he might receive more than the usual amount of pushback on any unpopular decision that he made.

Although he was a welcome figure to the students, teachers, and parents from his former high school in Elk Camp, Sam could already hear, in his mind, complaints that the board should have taken more time and conducted a formal search to make sure that he was the best person for the job. One of the concerns about the previous superintendent was that he had favored Elk Camp, and Sam was also very closely associated with that part of the district. He would have to step carefully into controversial decisions, making sure that his intentions were transparent and equitable. However, given all of that, Sam was excited about his new job and looked forward to leading the district. He knew that he had a lot to learn about organizational leadership and administration, but he was enthusiastic and hopeful about the challenges and the possibilities.

One of those challenges was in the clarity, frequency, and accessibility of communication. The district encompasses around 2,000 square miles and, in addition to the river that separates the two sides, there are long stretches of rural dirt roads that lead to ranches with inconsistent internet access. The disparity in family income between the two main communities in the district has also led to uneven internet access in student homes. Most of the community, however, adults and children alike, do own smart phones and lots of messages and information are sent in mobile format.

As part of the district’s student activities’ recruitment and communication, each coach and/or team has both a Facebook and Twitter account. Individual coaches sign up for their own accounts using their own names, but the accounts are clearly focused on matters that pertain to the sports program and, as far as Sam knew, had never been used for personal information. The accounts are accessed heavily by parents and some student members of the teams, and the coaches rely on them to make sure that students and families keep up on date and time changes, transportation and location issues, and other inspirational and team spirit messaging. No one from the school or district monitors the accounts and there have never been problems or complaints about anything that has been written. The coaches are aware that they are representing the district in their communications and have always been respectful of that line. Sam had coached girls’ basketball for several years, had operated a “team” page himself, and was very familiar with the process and perceived value of these social media accounts. The district also operated an official webpage and a Facebook account, and these were handled by staff at the district office (which, in this small district, meant the superintendent, the director of curriculum, and the executive assistant).

A Legal Challenge

It was January 14, and both students and teachers seemed to be settled back into their routines after the winter break. Sam was a little surprised to realize that he had been in his job since July and felt as if he had, at least so far, adroitly navigated most of the challenges that came with being a superintendent. He was also feeling pretty good about his relationship with the board and the school community. Then, as he sat at his desk reviewing correspondence, an unusual letter caught his full attention. It was addressed to him by name and had a heading that read: “Unauthorized Copying and Distribution of the Phrase ‘Lose with Joy, Win with Grace’ by Chasm School District.”

The letter, written using many formal legal terms, was from an individual named Steven Moon. Mr. Moon was writing to accuse the district of engaging in copyright infringement based on United States Copyright Law (USC, 2016, Title 17 §106 and §501). The letter explained that a coach from the boys’ baseball team at the high school in Bethel had retweeted a textual representation of the phrase “Lose with Joy, Win with Grace” and passage under copyright without attribution for the material, and perhaps had been credited with the authorship of said material. Mr. Moon noted that he had not been contacted by the district nor given permission for this use of his work and stated, in bold text, that “removal of the infringed works does not relieve you from liability for damages arising from your past infringements.”

The next several paragraphs of the letter presented Mr. Moon’s statements regarding the damages that he believed had been inflicted upon him because of the retweet. The damages he presented amounted up to $30,000 for each infringement and up to $150,000 for each willful infringement. Mr. Moon wrote that, “courts have typically enhanced damages 2-6 times for willful infringement and attorney’s fees may also be awarded.” He explained that “willful” was defined by having knowledge of the infringement or acting in “reckless disregard” of infringement. He then demanded the district’s insurance information and policy number, carrier, and claim number.

The letter finished with the statement, “given the facts provided, you are liable for willful copyright infringement” and a page of directives on what the district must do “promptly” to resolve the matter. In addition to some cease and desist statements, there was an offer to settle this whole matter, out of court, for the sum of $12,000.

Sam read the letter a second time, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. His initial thought was that this was some sort of scam. The letter felt like a threat directed at him and the district. He needed some time to think about his next steps. Tell the board? Call the district’s attorney? Ignore the whole thing? Maybe first he would just check out the Twitter account for the team and see for himself if it was even true.

A List of Questions

A quick glance at the coach’s Twitter account confirmed the accusation. The retweet was still easy to find. It was a fairly simple tweet, just the tag line “Lose with Joy, Win with Grace” and a couple of sentences about the power of character and integrity in sports. As Sam considered the situation, he recognized that he had very little knowledge of the rules of copyright law when it came to social media and that he had signed the user agreements of several social media platforms without really reading or understanding what he had been agreeing to do or not do. He assumed that his teachers and coaches had done the same thing. He also realized that he was not really sure if the social media accounts used by the coaches would be considered as part of the district or as personal accounts. The coaches were speaking on behalf of the district sports program, but they had signed up as individuals. The legal threat letter had come to him as a representative of the district, but the account in question was “owned” by the coach. Who was accountable for the content of those social media postings?

Sam had to leave for a meeting at the bus barn, so he left the letter on his desk and headed to his truck. As he drove, he decided that after he got back from the meeting, his next step should be a call to the district’s attorney to get some information about the legal reality of what they might be facing. Sam was worried about what the board would think of all of this. He felt that this issue could go to an executive session because it concerned possible litigation, but he could not predict how the board might react or what they would ask him. Sam had permission to approve district expenditures up to $30,000 without board approval. Maybe he should just do that and get this issue settled. The new board was well aware of the tension that had existed between the teachers and the former superintendent and board members and they had been clear with him that they wanted to move forward in a positive manner. Sam worried that this issue might cause some controversy that everyone wanted to avoid and that this might make the district look incompetent or disorganized in the eyes of parents.

The board was aware of and sensitive to its relationship with the taxpayers in the community, and Sam was not at all sure how the settlement offer might be perceived. Mr. Moon’s offer was for $12,000 and although that did not sound like a lot of money, in actuality, each high school received about $25,000 for the year. Thus, the payment would be half of one school’s money. Where and how should the district make reductions to pay for that settlement? The board was committed to upholding federal and state laws and if the district was culpable, they would want to handle that appropriately, too.

Sam was deeply concerned about the coach, Gary Henderson. Gary was an involved and committed coach, and also a skilled high school math teacher, and he would be very upset when he learned that his retweet had placed the district in this situation. It might be enough to make him quit. Sam did not think that he should discipline Mr. Henderson; he knew that Gary had sent out the message as a way to inspire the team and he was acting in his role as the coach, but this might end up as a very expensive mistake that would impact other budgets throughout the district. Was there any kind of reprimand that he should issue? Should he use this incident to teach a lesson to the rest of the staff and send a message about the use of social media? Sam could not be sure that no other coach had ever retweeted copyrighted content and he did not know how to check if that had happened. However, he did know that if he disciplined a coach from Bethel high school for this, and did not check if the same situation had ever happened with an Elk Camp team, people might accuse him of showing favoritism toward Elk Camp, where he had been the principal.

As Sam pulled into the parking lot of the transportation hub, his final reflection before he switched his focus to his upcoming bus meeting was on the professional learning opportunities that the district provided to staff at the start of each year. He made a mental note to review that agenda and see if copyright law was covered and how they had addressed social media and copyright law, if they had even included that as a topic. From now on, that subject would be front and center.

A Call With the Attorney

When Sam returned to his office later that day, he scanned and e-mailed the letter to Tricia Penny, the district’s attorney, and waited for a return call. She called him back around 4:00 p.m. Sam jumped in with his list of questions and concerns, starting with some basic queries about social media and copyright law and wondering specifically if retweeting someone else’s tweet was a copyright violation. He then wondered how someone would or could know where the original material came from and how they might know if the material was copyrighted. He also wanted to review his options, after getting this immediate situation resolved, regarding how he could protect the district from this situation occurring again. Should he assign a staff person to approve all social media content before it gets posted? Should he ban social media accounts altogether for all employees? Could he even do that?

Ms. Penny said that she would need to think through some of his questions before she could give him definitive responses, but she did have some information for him, as she had also read the letter from Mr. Moon and located the coach’s Twitter account. She had done some quick research on Mr. Moon and discovered that he had settled with numerous school districts and other institutions over the past couple of years for infringement of his copyrighted phrase. The phrase came from a book that he had published in 1984 and he had been very active in managing his work since then. It was easy to track his legal actions because he tended to make his legal threats to public institutions and their settlement agreements were often part of public board meetings and budget documents.

Ms. Penny explained that it was possible to try and fight the claim in a court of law and that in a recent case involving this very same issue, Mr. Moon had sued a sports club for a retweet of his phrase and, instead of paying the settlement, the sports club took the case to court. The court had issued a mixed opinion (Wilner, 2020) on different aspects of the lawsuit, but they had not agreed with all of the claims that were made by Mr. Moon. In particular, the court did not support the idea that a retweet was willful infringement, the very thing that Mr. Moon had accused Chasm School District of doing. The court had also questioned Mr. Moon’s claims for damages and the amounts that he argued were due to him because of the retweet and suggested that a lower amount might be more in line with the damages that he claimed he had suffered.

Ms. Penny and Sam then talked about the risks that the district needed to balance in considering if they should settle or allow the lawsuit to go to court. Given other institutions’ results with this particular individual, it was possible that the district might prevail. However, it would cost money to take the case to an actual court hearing, probably more than the $12,000 that Mr. Moon was demanding. The board would need to weigh the financial implications against the appearance of settling a case for which they might not be at fault. She offered to meet with the board in executive session as soon as possible to discuss this pending litigation, and they ended the call.

A Meeting With the Board

Sam was somewhat relieved by the conversation with Ms. Penny. Knowing that his district was not the only one that had been accused of this issue somehow made him feel less awful about the whole situation. At the upcoming state superintendents’ meeting, he would check with some of his colleagues to find out how they handled social media and warn them about what was happening in his district.

His next step was to speak with his board president and explain all of this to her. In a great stroke of luck for Sam, Roselyn Garcia, his board president, had been an assistant superintendent in a large district before she retired and move to Elk River, so she was almost always quick to understand many sides of issues that arose. Roselyn picked up her phone immediately and, after an exchange of greetings, Sam filled her in on the day’s events. She listened to Sam as he described the tweet, the letter, and his conversation with the attorney, and she expressed her support of both the coach and Sam. She noted that perhaps they all needed to review the district’s use of social media in light of this situation.

Roselyn grasped the board’s possible dilemma about a court battle or a settlement, recognizing that either one would be public information and that settling out of court sometimes looked like an admission of wrongdoing. However, it might also be the most expedient and the least expensive of their options. She and Sam decided to schedule a special meeting and adjourn to executive session to discuss pending litigation. Sam felt better after speaking with her and he worked with the executive assistant to invite Ms. Penny to executive session and to get the meeting on the calendar. The executive session was held 1 week later on January 21, allowing for appropriate time to post the agenda and notify the public that the meeting was taking place. Even though it was an executive session, and, as such, not open to the public, open meetings laws were still in effect.

During the executive session, the board listened to Ms. Penny explain the case and some of the previous litigation instigated by Mr. Moon. The board then discussed the various scenarios and their options. While they were upset at the accusations and tone of the letter and they thought they would prevail on some of the charges in court, if Sam could offer a lesser amount than what Mr. Moon had demanded, they might spend less on a settlement than they would on a court case. The board did not want a prolonged court battle and the costs and publicity that might accompany it, but they also did not want the public to interpret a settlement as an admission of guilt. After about an hour of debate, they decided that the best course of action was to have Sam attempt to negotiate a settlement with Mr. Moon. While they acknowledged ethical concerns, their decision was primarily financial, and they gave Sam direction to move ahead with a counteroffer. The board finished their executive session and the meeting was adjourned.

An Offer Is Made

The next day, January 22, Sam called Mr. Moon. He realized that he, too, felt like the district had been extorted and he was angry about it. Given that, he wanted to get this issue resolved, with some important lessons learned. After a couple of days of back and forth negotiations, Mr. Moon agreed to accept $6,500 and end his pursuit of legal action against the district. One week later, Sam received the settlement paperwork in the mail. The statement included language that said, “in order to avoid the time, expense, and uncertainty of litigation,” the district must remove the offending retweet and Mr. Moon would settle for the sum of $6,500. Because they had already discussed this issue in an executive session, Sam did not need to have the whole conversation again in open session. The board had given him permission to settle, but they did need to approve the settlement sum. He asked the executive assistant to put this item on the consent agenda for the next board meeting.

At the regularly scheduled meeting on February 3, the board approved a consent agenda item for the settling of possible litigation against the district. With that vote, Sam was cleared to sign the paperwork. As he wrote his name and the date on the legal agreement with Mr. Moon, he recognized that he was still upset at the settlement because he thought that the district might win in court, but he understood why the board had taken that action. He needed to move on to other concerns, including a rewrite of the professional development program to include a lot more on copyright laws and the use of social media.

Teacher Use of Social Media

Before we consider concerns about copyright law and social media, we need to establish some foundational knowledge about social media and teacher rights. Sam had wondered if he should ban all social media about and from Chasm School District to avoid this issue moving forward, but he was not sure if he could legally do that, even if he wanted to. While litigated long before Facebook or Twitter, the decisions made in Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968) are still often used in matters of teacher freedom of speech. In that ruling, the Supreme Court held that a public employee could not be disciplined if the speech was related to a matter of “public concern” and if the comments made were not knowingly or recklessly false. The Court also devised a balancing test to weigh the public employer’s need for a disruptive free workplace against the employee’s First Amendment rights.

In ruling on the later, yet related, case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006), the Court placed additional language into the balancing test that asks if the public employee’s speech was made while they were in the role of employee, in which case the speech would not be protected, or as a private citizen, in which case the speech may be protected. In other words, your rights to express yourself are different when you are at work for a public agency than when you are not at work and speaking as an individual. O’Connor and Schmidt (2015) explain that, “The government, as the employer, has the right to control the public employee’s speech as it relates to public service” (p. 2).

Pagani v. Meriden Board of Education (2006) is a case that highlights the complexities of protected speech for teachers. Pagani was employed as a middle school science teacher in Meriden, Connecticut. In 2002, two students approached him and told him that a substitute teacher had, while showing them pictures of his trip to Europe, shared a photo of himself with two nude women. Pagani reported this incident to his principal and the principal told him to not report the incident to the Department of Children and Families (DCF). Pagani disagreed with this advice and filed a verbal complaint with the director of DCF. One day later, the principal came to Pagani’s classroom and told him to report to the superintendent of the district. At that meeting, Pagani was informed that he had been reassigned as a permanent substitute and that the district was beginning termination proceedings. Pagani filed several grievances regarding this move, claiming that his demotion was in retaliation for filing the complaint, and the case ended up in court.

The district argued that Pagani’s transfer was because he had an “inability to maintain regular attendance” and that his “extensive absences from work” had a detrimental impact on his performance, and had nothing to do with his complaint to DCF. The district offered evidence that Pagani missed 322 teacher work days over two school years due to a work-related injury and subsequent stroke and contended that Pagani’s reassignment was necessary to protect the interests of the students and provide a consistent teacher presence in the science department (Letter from Elizabeth M. Ruocco to James C. Ferguson, September 27, 2002, Ex. N to Local Rule 56a(1) Stat, Pagani v. Meriden, 2006).

Pagani’s attorneys hoped to establish a causal connection between his protected speech, filing of the DCF claim, and the adverse action, the transfer. In their Motion for Summary Judgment, the defendants argue that Pagani cannot demonstrate a violation of his First Amendment Rights. O’Connor and Schmidt describe the court’s ruling as:

The Connecticut federal district court found that the teacher’s report to the DCF was made pursuant to his official job responsibilities and that the teacher was not speaking as a citizen in making the DCF report (McCarthy & Eckes, 2008; Pagani v. Meriden Board of Education, 2006). Therefore, the court refused to protect the teacher from the disciplinary action imposed by the employer. (p. 3)

The court specifically commented that public employees cannot make an employment issue a public concern simply by voicing their grievances through a public medium such as Facebook, Twitter, or the local newspaper’s letters to the editor (Pagani v. Meriden Board of Education, 2006). First Amendment precedent does not protect a public employee who is airing personal grievances online (Connick v. Myers, 1983 as quoted in O’Connor & Schmidt, 2015, p. 4).

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p. 61), as quoted in O’Connor and Schmidt (2015, p. 1), define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”

Facebook was created in 2004 by students at Harvard and with more than 2 billion monthly active users and, now, it is the most popular social media platform in the world. Twitter, born in 2006, has 330 million monthly active users, the majority between the ages of 35 and 65 (Lin, 2020). Despite this user load, the court system is at an emergent state with social media concerns and most litigation has taken place in state court systems and not at the federal level.

Rodesiler (2017) researched school district policies about teacher use of social media and found that 30% (n = 30) had social media policies in place and that Facebook and Twitter were mentioned specifically in 89% of them. Rodesiler also identified three encompassing themes in the policies: “(a) defining social media; (b) reiterating pre-existing policies; and (c) supporting educational use of social media” (p. 296). Another interesting finding in Rodesiler’s study was the topics most frequently addressed in social media policies. Of interest to this case study was the appearance of:

Decker (2014) writes that districts sometimes pursue restrictive social media policies for staff in part for the “prevention of controversial employee online speech and behavior” (p. 167), especially as the boundaries between public and private lives have become more fluid. Adding to the complications of this issue, no federal legislation on this specific issue exists, so state legislation and even individual district policies have been guiding how social media concerns may be resolved. An extreme example of this can be found in Louisiana, where La. R.S. 17:81 subset B, General Powers of Local Public School Boards mandates that districts adopt electronic communication policies that include social media and that the communication must take place through a system provided by the district (Younger, 2017). Despite states and districts searching to control social media through policy, Decker (2014) concluded that

Adopting restrictive policies that attempt to extend the law by regulating the mode of communication are unneeded and unwise for several reasons: they run the risk of being unconstitutional; they can be interpreted as condescending to education professionals; they discount the many benefits of social media; and they place unrealistic burdens on administrators and educators. (p. 202)

Goldman (2020, p. 2) concurs in discussing the difficulties in trying to determine if an employee’s account should be considered as a personal account, an extension of their employer, both, neither, or something else. He writes, “This is Yet Another reminder that distinguishing between ‘employee’ and ‘employer’ social media accounts is a fool’s errand, even though a bunch of laws from the last decade cluelessly tried to do exactly that.”

Copyright Law and Social Media

The idea of protecting intellectual property is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, and the first laws regarding the idea of copyright appeared in 1790. Major revisions to the act were implemented in 1831, 1870, 1909, and 1976 (Association of Research Libraries, 2020). The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (U.S Copyright Office, DMCA, 1988) was passed in 1988, which was early days for the pervading presence of social media. Whereas the DMCA was comprehensive for the time in which it was written, it may not adequately address current copyright conflicts. It does, however, provide a copyright holder with some procedures to request that their original material be removed from a website or other internet site where the use is a copyright infringement. While there continue to be legal updates and legislative rulemaking regarding copyright issues, little direction has been given through those laws regarding how to govern copyright works with social media platforms that are heavily dependent on the concepts of sharing, linking, and retweeting.

Despite the lack of federal or state laws specific to social media, Facebook, Twitter, and other popular sharing sites have terms of service (TOS) or terms of use (TOU) that provide the legal language that users agree to abide by as they utilize each site. A key to understanding the issue under study in this case is that the origin of the content matters a great deal. As explained by Jessica Alm (2014), content can be thought of as user-found or user-generated. She notes that

Much of this user-generated content may be copyrightable, but by simply posting it online, users transfer broad rights to social media companies through the sites’ TOU. This leaves users with little bargaining power and questionable ownership rights in their own content. (p. 106)

In contrast, user-found content is shared on social media sites by people who are not the creators and do not have any rights to the material. That is where the TOS come into play. When someone checks the “agree” box when signing up for an account, the user is agreeing to uphold the site’s copyright rules, and in turn the site will recognize the rights of the user-generated material. The user also is agreeing to the site’s ownership of content that is posted. For Twitter, the TOU reads:

By posting content, users grant us [Twitter] a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed) (Twitter, n.d.)

Alm (2014, p. 116) describes “two possible avenues of infringement by user-found content: (1) sharing someone else’s original content, and (2) sharing content that is already infringing.” This case highlights a problem that arose from sharing content that was already infringing. In other words, the coach retweeted content that had been tweeted by someone else and had not asked for permission from the original author (Mr. Moon) before he made the post.

Eric Goldman (2020) gives a clear description of recent court holdings in a case similar to the one in this study. He writes that on the charge of direct infringement as part of a motion to dismiss, the court was uncertain if a retweet was legally a “copy” of the original work. The defense had argued that

Linking doesn’t create new copies of the linked work so a retweet cannot, as a matter of law, generate an “actionable copy” of copyrighted material, because “[t]he instructions, storage, management, and reflection back to the original tweet all were governed exclusively by Twitter and took place exclusively on Twitter’s servers.” (p. 1)

The court explained that defendants may be liable for direct infringement if their conduct creates a new electronic copy of copyrighted material—but are not liable if they simply link to the original copy. The court also found that there was no evidence that the defendants knew that the phrase used was copyrighted and, therefore, there was no willful infringement.

Given the court’s opinion, it is possible that Chasm School District would not be found guilty of many of the charges that Mr. Moon had detailed in his letter.

Professional Development

In a research study conducted by Egger and Springer (2018, p. 24), 64% of respondents stated that none of their undergraduate coursework in teacher preparation had covered copyright law, and 36% reported one or two classes that included some content about copyright law. The majority of participants did not feel confident in their knowledge of copyright law as they completed their college degree. When asked about any professional development that they had received from their school districts, “76% had not attended in-service sessions focused on understanding copyright law. Furthermore, almost all of the respondents (93.90%) reported that their school or district had not offered sessions on understanding copyright law” (p. 27). These findings may expose both an explanation for occurrences such as the one described here and a need for focused professional development of this increasingly significant concern.

Discussion Questions