Trademark and Copyright in the Art Classroom
Increasingly art education is incorporating such subjects as Graphic Design, Video and Animation projects including interactive games and Website design.

However if these projects are to be entered into competitions or published, the teacher should have a clear understanding of Intellectual Property Law.

Intellectual Property is any product of the human imagination that has or potentially has commercial value. These are:
Trade Secrets
Copyrights
Trademarks
Patents

The student should be aware of Intellectual Property laws to both avoid violating an owner’s rights as well as having an understanding of their own rights as regards protection of their own work.

The two kinds of protection most likely to apply to your class projects:
Copyrights – Is in force at the moment of publication. This is the most common type of Intellectual Property and protects all kinds of creative work; Copyright Law protects Music, Art, Web Pages, and Writing of all kinds. This can be both an informal or formal protection (registered with the government) and covers only the actual form the work takes. This can also be somewhat ambiguous, for example, the Mona Lisa is “owned “ by the Louve and American Gothic is “owned” by the Art Institute of Chicago and if one were to use either of these images in a work; a webpage, an advertisement, a book on art history or a package, you would owe the owner compensation. However if you were to create a “homage” of one of these works that, while incorporating many aspects of the work, but did not actually copy the work, you’d almost certainly be safe. For Example, see the homage to the Mona Lisa on the cover of Nasco's 2006 Catalog or the homage to American Gothic on the cover of the January 2006 issue of arts & activities Magazine.
Trademark concerns commercial trade and, while your students should understand it, they probably would not run into a situation where they might infringe on a trademark. This is the symbols, colors, names and phrases and so on that a business uses to identify it and it’s products. It can be register in a state or with the US federal government. Other governments, in the countries where it is used, also protect a trademark. There is also as with copyright, an informal trademark call a common-law trademark and falls to a company for a mark they use in commerce even if the mark is not registered with a government agency (in the US this would be the USPTO).
It is very easy for a student to download or scan an image for use on a webpage or a printed document. It is even easier for a student rip a piece of music for a video or animation project. This is probably fine if a student uses a piece of popular music for background in a project only his family will see.
However if a student submits this work to a competition or publishes it to the web and does not have permission from the owner of the intellectual property used, the judges will certainly reject the piece or, in case of publication, the owner could bring a lawsuit and demand compensation.
The best thing would be to have a student create his or her own illustration or photograph for a project. If a musical piece is required, the student may be able to create a piece on the computer, or possibly work with musicians to create an original score.
If these options are not available, there is a great deal of royalty-free material available for students to incorporate in their projects.
For Music: http://www.SoundClick.com has over 200,000 tracks from Classical to Hip-Hop students can incorporate into video, interactive games, websites, and any other project where sound needs to be an integral element.
For Illustration and Photography: There are many sources for 2D royalty-free and public domain pictures. Examples include; http://www.NovaDevelopment.com, http://www.DoverPublications.com, http://www.NASA.gov/multimedia and many others.
We have put together a single page resource (Acrobat PDF document) for the classroom explaining in brief copyright and intellectual property and suggesting some resources for you. Just click here to download this document

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Read our January essay: Counseling your students on choices for Higher Education
Read our December essay: Why Teaching Visual Art is now a Necessity
Read our November essay: Teaching Collage as Social Critic
Read our October essay: The Place of the Body in Education
Read our September essay: The Ways Artists Support Themselves
Read our August essay: Why students should copy the great works
Read our July essay: Hidden Clues in Works of Art
Read our June essay: The Mathematics of Art
Read our May essay: The Importance of School Art Competitions
Read our January essay : Art History and the Internet
Read our March essay: Ink Jet Printers and the Color Wheel:

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