Copy Right Laws

What are some new things you learned about copyright that you hadn’t known before?
Before this class, I had very little knowledge of copy right issues. I now realize that I have often broken copyright laws in class, unfortunately. I have shown clips of movies as illustrations of particular subjects in a class many times. And I'm sure that those clips were longer than the allowed length. It was also helpful to learn that many educational sources allow their work to be open source.

Do you believe that copyright laws are fair as they are currently written? What specifically do you believe to be fair/unfair?
On one hand, I can understand wanting to protect one's work and wanting to control where it is used. However, I also think these laws are burdensome, impractical and difficult to enforce as a teacher. If I was trying to make a profit by using other people's work or showing someone else's work to thousands of people then I could understand the concern. But I am simply a teacher trying to use multimedia in my class to make it more interesting, so I think the laws should make it easier for copy-righted materials to be used in an educational setting.

Tell me what you must do to make sure whatever you are using in your classroom will fall under Fair Use protection.
I think the first step to making sure my work falls under Fair Use protection, is making sure I know where to go to check if I'm not sure. So I will be sure to keep the links that were provided to us for future reference. I will also have a list of common Fair Use issues and how to make sure I'm abiding by Fair Use printed out and in a place where I can easily access it in class.

How will you enforce copyright within your own classroom with your students?
I plan on having a brief explanation of Fair Use issues as well as examples of how they can use video, music and so on within Fair Use. We also go through these guidelines in the beginning of class.