Copyright Legislation Copyright law is complex and changes with each session of Congress. The current law is the Copyright Act of 1976 with amendments and is available online. Such recent legislation as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DCMA) begins to address the complications of digital material. Copyright legislation will continue to evolve in an attempt to keep abreast of technological changes. Consult your district and state legal services on specific questions and visit the Web site for the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress for more information. Material need not be registered or display a copyright statement to be copyright protected, but it must be original and be in a fixed, tangible medium. E-mail, listserv messages, threaded discussions, and Web pages meet these two important criteria and they should be considered copyrighted material. Warn teachers and students against the illegal practice of copying and using digital material without permission from the copyright holder, whether this material is text, pictures, graphics, or other multimedia elements. Software is copyrighted and is usually licensed. Pay strict attention to licensing agreements. Use cloning software on a lab or network server to periodically check the network and remove non-licensed software. Many digital materials now include technological protective measures (TPMs), and the DMCA assigns stiff penalties to anyone found guilty of bypassing TPMs to obtain copyrighted material. 2 Copyright Law of 1976 Copyright grants the holder these rights: to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission