Scenario: An online teacher plans on creating an educational video for students to view prior to the weekly online lessons to give students access to the key content. Power point slides created by the teacher will be converted to a movie of about 60 seconds in duration. Music purchased by the teacher will be added to the movie file. The completed movie will be uploaded to the virtual classroom which is password protected.
Is this breaching copyright laws?
The use of short extracts of music to accompany power point presentations is allowable under the 'Flexible Dealing Exception-s 200AB exception' of the Copyright Act . As the teacher is using the music files for educational purposes and is only using an amount that is reasonable, this is acceptable use and would not breach copyright.
An alternative to using commercially purchased music would be to search for free accessible music that can be downloaded. Sites such as Jamendo provide a wide range of music files. It is possible to search for instrumental music that would be appropriate as background music for videos.
It would be recommended to attribute the music at the end of the presentation.
