Response to Copyright reading

Wow. Copyright and fair use protections are tricky. I always knew they were, but I've never actually seen it laid out as comprehensively as this (and it wasn't even that comprehensive). The reading, Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom, on the Internet, and the World Wide Web, gives introduction to copyright, fair use, and educational multimedia guidelines.

After reading this, I'm reasonably sure that many of my teachers (a particular history teacher's class leaps to mind) may have not been technically following the guidelines for copyright and fair use strictly to the letter. From what I can understand, using something for educational purposes doesn't necessarily make it okay.

As a future educator, I expect that the issue of copyright and fair use will come up over and over again. This article gives me a little bit of a better idea of what is and is not ethical... however, it even states that nothing is exactly black and white (obviously taking someone else's words and claiming them as your own is plagiarism, but fair use is something else altogether). Even still, it's probably better to be safe than sorry...