Copywrong

Have you ever heard someone tell you that you can only photocopy 30% of this, 10% of that, use 30 seconds of this song, and so on? I learned that all of that is not actually law. These are conditions school boards, schools, and other facilities or organizations have come up with to help protect themselves against lawsuits and so on. In Wesley Fryer's blog, he writes that, "As educators, we need accurate and practical guidelines to follow when using and re-using media in student multimedia projects as well as our own." This is definitely a must, however, I'm sure you would agree with me, that the very definition of copyright is hazy. Especially now in the digital era that we live, copyright is not the same anymore. It, in fact, has evolved. Many people have different conceptions about what copyright means and there is certainly a lack of clarity out there of what one can and cannot use or copy or borrrow. Do we as a society need to re-think copyright laws? Good question. When one country's copyright laws are so different from the next country, it makes it very confusing to know and understand copyright. This leads me to the world of Creative Commons.
To provide some background if you have never heard of Creative Commons (and I hadn't until this course I'm taking), it is a non-profit organization. In a document entitled "Understanding Copyright", it states that, " The fair use doctrine allows users to make use of copyrighted works without permission or payment when the benefit to society outweighs the cost to the copyright holder. " It goes on to say that, " ...the use of copyrighted material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” is not an infringement. Understaning this, it became apparent to me that educators have a lot of leeway when wanting to utilize a copyrighted piece of work. Of course, whatever is chosen to be used must be absolutely needed and used to enhance education in the classroom.

Click here to test your copyright knowledge with this quiz.

What is your understanding of copyright? How well do you respect the music industry's copyright laws? Do you watch burned DVDs? If you have children, does copyright discussion every come up?