I generally consider myself pretty much an expert on copyright. But I had no idea that educators could use copyrighted works in their curriculum, even if they planned to sell that curriculum!

It turns out that the word "transformative" means something much broader than I had thought. "Transformative use" to me meant "making a remix, a mashup, a collage." Legally, though, there's precedent that "transformative use" can actually mean "recontextualizing something"!

So if I plan on using a scene from the CW show Supernatural to talk about TV's treatment of women, I can do that. Supernatural was certainly not intended to teach anyone about TV's treatment of women and how to be aware of TV shows' subtle methods of enculturation! It's transformative use for me to take that scene and develop curriculum around it.

Now that's putting copyright law to work for me! And it answers, once and for all, a lot of the fears we had about whether or not we could make the Learning Library use as much pop culture as we had hoped. The answer is resoundingly "yes, we can!"