All too often when you come across a really good resource online you want to share it with others who you know will benefit from it as much as you did. Unfortunately in being a Good Samaritan at times you may be breaking the law. You may not even be aware you are doing something illegal as copyright law is not something everybody understands clearly. Here are a few tips to share resources you find in a legal manner.
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Physical Material
The curriculum based text books that you bought and any teacher’s guides that came with the lot can be reused for each of your children. These materials can be passed on to others physically when you no longer are using them. However any workbooks that you picked up are supposed to be used only by one child. Some homeschooling parents may like to save money by buying a single workbook and using it with multiple children by copying out the pages that have the practice exercises. Copying pages out of the work book is technically against copyright law. If you have decided to pass on a used workbook to another person that is also against the law.
Digital Resources
These include .pdf files, computer software, ebooks, and any other resource present in a digital format. Digital format is what you see as the soft copy on a computer. It also includes the audio visual files such as audio books and learning videos. If you have purchased any of these digital resources they must be for the use of your family alone. They can not be legally mailed to other people to allow them to use them. That is against the copyright law. Some companies allow you to use digital files on multiple devices for personal use, but other may prohibit this multiple machine usage model.
What about free stuff?
If you have picked up free downloads you can share them with others. However you can not share the downloaded file per say. You can share the url (unique resource locator) where the free download is available. This is essentially an address to a specific website page from where your friends can download the same free resource.
Article Inspiration: About Homeschooling
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