Copyright Confusion Is Shortchanging Our Students
When teachers in a suburban-Philadelphia school district heard about the music industry’s legal victory requiring a single mother from Minnesota to pay more than $220,000 for sharing 24 songs online, the news seemed to confirm their worst suspicion: It isn’t safe to use digital media as a teaching tool. The changing legal climate around what is considered “fair use” for such resources is intensifying a culture of fear among teachers and students. “I’ve got a stash of videotapes with copyrighted excerpts of TV shows, movies, advertising, news, and music videos that I use all the time in my teaching,” one teacher told me after learning about the court decision. “I wonder if they’re going to come after me someday.”
It is ironic that, at a time when online digital technologies are enabling users to create and share an ever-widening array of multimedia texts, this kind of educational fear is also on the rise. Teachers are afraid of being harassed by media companies, and this is stifling innovation in the use of digital...
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