Is showing college material illegal? My question is the title, the rest is just an explanation. I'm a student at Penn State University in the US. Is it illegal for me to show course material to a public audience like on my YouTube channel? When I was in High School I always wondered how difficult college assignments would be and how they would look, so now I want to kill that curiosity for others by showing the entire class' assignments etc. etc. and stuff. To my knowledge I don't know of anyone who's done that except for outdated content like from the 1800s that no one cares about anymore. So, is it illegal for me to share course content online?
Course assignments, like practically every other piece of written content created in the past 100 years or so, are copyrighted. You cannot copy or redistribute them without the permission of the copyright holder. In most cases that would be the course instructor, but it could also be the university, or the publisher of a commercial book or other resource where the questions came from. The instructor might be happy to give you permission if you ask - many professors would be pleased to have their creations reach a wider audience. In any case, it is perfectly legal to talk about the assignment you were given, as long as you do not copy or replicate the text of the assignment itself. Reading it verbatim or with trivial alterations would be a problem, but describing it completely in your own words doesn't infringe copyright. A separate issue is what is allowed by your university rules. University rules aren't laws, but you can still be punished academically if you break them (grade penalties, suspension, expulsion, etc). The university might have a policy against sharing, or even discussing, assignments without permission. This might include forbidding actions that the law itself allows. In particular, they might forbid you from talking about your solutions to the assignments, which copyright law would have no problem with (your solution is your own creative work, and the copyright on it belongs to you). So again, ask your instructor what they would allow. Also, academic ethics (which again is not a law, but might be enforced by your university) would generally require that you give proper attribution to the author of the assignment you are discussing. Note that there are plenty of online collections of so-called &quot;open courseware&quot;, where the university deliberately makes their course materials public, under some sort of open license such as Creative Commons. MIT's repository is one of the most famous. So if you can't get permission to use the materials from your Penn State courses, you could always make videos about MIT's assignments instead.
The question that you need to answer is whether, when you embed, you "copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content". It seems that you have done that, i.e. you didn't just "watch". The next question is whether you have "prior written consent of YouTube". Youtube requires a license from contributors granting users the right to "access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service". To fill the gap, you have to determine whether your act of embedding is permitted by the Youtube TOS. Their TOS states §2A that "The Service" includes the YouTube "Embeddable Player". It also says §4 YouTube hereby grants you permission to access and use the Service as set forth in these Terms of Service, provided that: (A) You agree not to distribute in any medium any part of the Service or the Content without YouTube's prior written authorization, unless YouTube makes available the means for such distribution through functionality offered by the Service (such as the Embeddable Player). On the face of it and as long as you do the stuff that follows in B-I, you have complied with that requirement and therefore you have written permission from Youtube.
All Government produced documents in the United States are public domain, as they belong to the people. The company may be asking for license to use their film, which may include several other clips that they put in any order. Their film, specifically, including any explanatory dialog, commentary, or editing choices, are not fair game. However, the clip you are asking about is not copyrighted and is fair for any use.
It is legal. What would be illegal is for a public school to promote or inhibit a religion. You can teach all sorts of facts that touch on religion (millennia of Western history) and you can e.g. survey the major religions of the worlds as a cultural phenomenon. You can use circumlocutions or proper names. It's not illegal to confess to having personal beliefs. This is about public schools, which is an arm of the government. A person who is in a school, for example a student, is not prohibited from promoting or demoting a religion, therefore a student who clearly and openly advocates the Pastafarian faith is not to be sanctioned, except insofar as the conduct is objectively disruptive. This is because the student is clearly not acting as an agent of a government institution. Things are a little murky when it comes to teachers and guest speakers. Teachers do not lose their First Amendment rights when they enter the classroom. Here is a summary of pertinent court rulings. The main principle that comes from such cases is that school districts can direct teachers to refrain from certain actions when there is a reasonable belief that the actions would run afoul of the Establishment Clause. Individual teachers have been ordered to not engage in silent reading of prayers in school (Roberts v. Madigan). Case law on guest lecturers is probably close to zero, since guest lecturers don't have the same kind of property right to be at the school expressing themselves as teachers do.
To do so I used some images and Gifs which may be under copyright but since I don't earn money for myself and there is no company backing me I was hoping that there is some protection for private persons like me who just want to showcase the project. Sorry. If your website is public facing (i.e. not password protected and available only to family and close friends), you need to follow copyright law. There is no exception to copyright just because a project is run by an individual for non-commercial purposes. I am also insecure about the GDPR regulations since I give users the ability to create an account and try it out. Your profile says you're in the EU. Then you need to comply with the GDPR. Is there any way to protect me against greedy lawyers and companies? Could I write something like: "This website is a peace of art" and save myself with arguments like "artistic freedom" or "free speech"? Nope. A controversial website run by Peter Sunde had at one point a "free speech" disclaimer (similar to the one you propose) posted. However, Sunde did never use this defense in court: Finnish court slaps Peter Sunde with €350k fine. If he had shown up in court, I am pretty sure the court would have told him that such a disclaimer has no legal merit. The only protection that will make you completely safe is to adhere to the law.
The first step is to file a formal complaint against the instructor. When your university-internal avenues have been exhausted, you would then need to hire an attorney to sue the university. There is virtually no chance that you will succeed with a lawsuit. If the university had failed to follow its own procedures, or had egregiously violated your rights, you might win such a suit, but the chances of that having happened are virtually zero. The essential problem is that there is no specific contractual right for you to receive an particular outcome in a class (based on my knowledge of rules &amp; regs in various universities). For example, you might reasonably want to have written comments on assignments given within a week: but there is no rule guaranteeing that you will ever get written comments. (You need to look at the university rules to see what is an actual rule, as opposed to a "goal" for an academic unit). Since there is no such rule, the chairman has limited authority to penalize the instructor (he might for example decide to not assign that class to Prof. X in the future). The chair would not have the authority to raise your grade under the circumstances. As far as the courts are concerned, the university's judgment and resolution of the matter are final, unless they simply failed to respect your rights (exhibited racial prejudice, refused to follow their own procedures). In certain contexts, professorial negligence could be legally actionable, but that would only be, for example, if an EE professor physically harmed a student by negligently confusing milliamps and mega-amps. His (non)action is not negligent in the legal sense.
I don't know too much about Mauritian contract law, but I'd assume you'd have to identify some legal obligation that the school breached. Here, the school offered you a full ride in its electrical engineering program, and has delivered on its promise. The fact that you don't like the program anymore probably doesn't make then liable for anything. In terms of false advertising, it's hard to say anything without seeing their advertisements.
There is nothing wrong with this requirement. The teacher or professor isn't requiring you to change your opinion. Instead, the requirement is simply to marshall evidence in favor of an opinion that you may not hold. Being able to do this is a valuable rhetorical skill (and a skill which lawyers must routinely employ). For example, in competitive debate, you often do not have the freedom to decide whether you will be arguing in favor or against a resolution, and may not even know which side you will be advancing until moments before the event starts. Freedom of conscience does not extend to freedom from understanding people who disagree with your deeply held belief. UPDATE: Requiring a whole classroom of students (possibly many classrooms of students) to advocate with multiple representatives for a bill does seem problematic, in terms of election laws and probably in terms of the legal requirements that apply to the university, and also possibly in terms of "forced speech", because in requiring the advocacy to be submitted to the official and take a particular position, goes beyond the "let's pretend" veneer that applies in most debate contexts.