Thursday, February 17, 2011
Copyright Confusion Corrected
As citizens of a rich nation we take many things for granted; there are plenty of freedoms Americans have that many other countries do not provide their citizens. Living in this internet savvy world we have blurred the line of property rights. If we have access to it, then it is free to use at our leisure. Unfortunately, this is wrong thinking in many people's lives, including teachers. There are laws for copyrighting, and sadly I have seen most of my teachers break these rules. For example, when I was in high school right before the holiday winter break the school would play a movie broadcasting on all the TV monitors in the building. If classes did not have work and did not want to start a new topic the teacher could turn on the movie, one year I remember Finding Nemo. Nonetheless, this is breaking copyright laws. You are not allowed to show a full presentation of a movie in a public setting unless it is for educational purposes. These movies had no connection to education whatsoever. Additionally, after reviewing the powerpoint on Copyright laws I found it interesting only three minutes or 10% of motion media may be displayed in a classroom, along with only 30 seconds or 10% of a song, 1000 words or 10% of a text, and five images from one author. If you want to show more you must receive permission from the publisher. This seems like a lot of work for teachers, when we already have lesson plans to create, parent and teacher conferences to attend, tests and papers to be graded, and classrooms to manage. I guess if we learn in the beginning to follow copyright guidelines in our teaching methodology it will become habit.
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I agree, there is a lot of work for us to do as teachers when it comes to copyright laws, but I also think that we will have more help than we are aware of. Even if its simply from the person we give our papers to copy. They are more informed and can keep us in line with the laws. I still do agree that it's a lot of work and that we do have to spend more time really learning the copyright laws in order to protect not only other people's work but ourselves from lawsuits. I am still unclear about a lot of things we read about the copyright laws, but some more research on them will be helpful to all of us. I think if we spend the time now learning them, they will be upheld in our future classrooms.
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