Organizing Your Message: Test your copyright knowledge

Test your copyright knowledge

Test your knowledge of copyright law with this quick quiz. Are you potentially on the wrong side of the law in any of these scenarios? A powerful three-minute segment from the war movie "The Thin Red Line" underscores a key point in your upcoming presentation on leadership skills. Considering the clip a "fair use" of existing work, you import it into your presentation for showing to 50 senior-level managers.

An article from Fast Company magazine nicely supports points you'll make in an upcoming presentation. You photocopy the article and include it in your handout packet, placing full attribution ("Reprinted from the May 1999 issue of Fast Company") at the bottom of each reproduced page.

You purchase some clip art from an organization's Web site on a "royalty-free" license, meaning you pay a one-time flat fee for lifetime use. Because you now effectively own the rights, you decide to share the clip art with a fellow presenter who's helped you out in the past. He adds some animation to the art and uses it in his next PowerPoint presentation.

You slip a funny "Dilbert" cartoon into an overhead presentation, and later tape two others you've blown up from last week's newspaper on your training-room walls. In both cases, you've photocopied the originals.

Using your laptop CD drive, you play a song from singer Celine Dion's latest work (you own the CD) to accompany a PowerPoint presentation. Later, in the same presentation, you again reach into your collection to play Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D," performed by organist Karl Richter.

Are these violations? The short answers -- assuming you haven't secured permission from copyright owners or necessary licenses for the specific uses -- are:

1. Probably yes. 2. Emphatically yes. 3. Most likely yes. 4. Definitely yes. 5. Yes and yes.

* Dave Zielinski