Fair Use Tool

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Main Task:

Designing and coding an interactive online tool that will be accessible for middle-school students and their teachers. There is some existing code that needs adjustment, and the rest of the coding would require working with legal and educational project members to design and refine the interface, develop additional functionality, add content, and translate the project vision into a finished product.


Skills needed:

  • A solid working knowledge of MySQL databases
  • A solid understanding of the Ruby-on-Rails framework
  • Design experience / interest
  • Knowledge about educational games would be beneficial
  • An ability to communicate with and work alongside non-coders


About the tool:

The Fair Use Tool is our proposal for how to teach young people about an especially difficult area of copyright law. First, students pick a creative work that appropriates copyrighted content in some way. They can either chose one of the sample court cases, a video found on YouTube, an image that is copyrighted by someone else, or their own creative work. Students then answer six multiple-choice questions about the work they have chosen. Each question is worth one point; depending on how students answer the question, the point turns green or red. At the end of the six questions, students total their green points and their red points. If there are more green points, it looks like the use is more likely than not to be deemed “fair” by a court. If there are more red points, the use is less likely to be deemed a fair use by a court. Because it is the student, not the tool, who makes the judgment call on each question, students are likely to realize that other opinions are needed to make a good decision. Students are encouraged to work with each other to compare answers and insights on specific works.


Mentor: scortesi@cyber.law.harvard.edu

General Questions: berkmancenterharvard@gmail.com