Digital Rules Center
The Digital Rules Center is a series of short documents that are designed to provide the students with clear guidance about the rules for using content – music, video, pictures and text – that is other than your own, inside of your Meridian Stories digital story.
Digital Rules – The Starting Line
Whether you are working on your challenge for Meridian Stories or pursuing a creative project of your own, you may find yourself wanting to use material you find on the Internet, material that may be protected…
Guide to Creative Commons Licenses
In general, work belongs to the creator who produced it and cannot be used by another party without proper permission and/or payment of a fee. When creating your movies, it is simplest to use only…
Essential Guide and Checklist – The Doctrine of Fair Use
This section of the Meridian Stories website details the Doctrine of Fair Use and what you need to know to make use of it in your creative projects. Start with this Essential Guide…
Case Studies – The Doctrine of Fair Use
One way to understand the application of successful and not-so-successful applications of fair use to the use of copyrighted material is to look at real court cases…
Guide to Citing Sources
For all projects, citing your sources fully and properly is the most important step in the process and ethically required to avoid plagiarism. Any outside source that is used…
Guide to Royalty-Free Music and Sound Effects
Copyright laws prevent you from using popular music that might be in your music library unless you pay what is called a ‘royalty fee’. This is a fee that is negotiated…
Appropriate Uses – The Doctrine Of Fair Use
The Doctrine of Fair Use is a set of criteria that govern the degree to which you can use other people’s content – their pictures, video and artistic creations, for example – in your own digital creations. In the Essential Guide and Checklist, there is labeled the four criteria…
Guide to Working in the Public Domain
Google and other search engines have done many wonderful things for the Internet, not the least of which was to make it accessible to the average person by delivering…
Using Social Media as a Research Tool
Social media is not just a way to communicate with friends. It is a primary source of news as well. According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans get their news from social media. In fact, the largest news publisher…
Myths and Misunderstandings – The Doctrine of Fair Use
This page outlines a few myths about fair use and copyright law that are often disseminated and may affect your utilization…