Our class about Copyright was fun and really eye-opening for me. I was surprised to learn that even if a teacher just uses some copyright material to illustrate a class (in a power point presentation, for example) that he/she gives every year, they should by law ask permission to do so, but it is ok if you use the material for just ONE lesson only. Another thing that amazed me was the fact that if a teacher wants to pass a movie to his/her students, unless it is part of the curriculum, the teacher should ask for the license to show the movie to his/her class. Also, I found it really interesting to hear the examples of problems caused by parents regarding copyright violation.
Everyday we see copyright violations in schools done by students and teachers, such as photocopy of materials for instruction purpose (instead of buying the whole book), use of music, movies, images to illustrate a presentation used every year by a teacher, use of music as part of a video made by students and presented at school, etc. Out of the Academic world things are even worse: people download videos, music, images without permission or copy software programs to be installed in more than one computer; people copy recipes and publish as their own; people copy paintings (if they are art students), and the list goes on and on. But, for me, in the web is where nowadays most of the copyright violations happen, because of the easy access to the information and the illusion that one is protected by his/her anonymaty.
I think, as educators, we have to teach our students about copyright, because the general population (including most of the parents) doesn’t realize how serious it is and how it really applies for almost every creative work out there. We can do it by showing them videos about it from youtube, saying that you can just do that using internet connection, not downloading it, because it would be an infraction, and also we could ask students to be in the “artist’s” shoes, making them express what would be their feeling if anyone stole their work. Anyway, I would show them some real shocking examples of copyright violation and their consequences, and then ask them to reason about it, because they take all the materials in the web for granted, so they must learn that here in the US copyright violation is really a big deal.
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