When I was a senior in high school, physics class was always the highlight of the day. The teacher, an eccentric individual with a certain passion for the insane, was known for putting on quite the show. Between building K'Nex roller coasters that spanned a classroom, to launching rockets on the football field and throwing flaming tennis balls down the hallway, he certainly gained a reputation for doing things differently.
In one of the last days of school, he decided to treat my class (made entirely of seniors itching to graduate) to a movie, something related to physics but still entertaining; The Hurt Locker. At this point the movie had just come out on DVD, and my friends and I never actually had the chance to see it, and so we gathered around the small TV screen to watch. After reading the articles and watching the movie on what determines fair use, I now question the legality of what my teacher did, but also reconciling the question; if it is illegal, is it really that bad of a crime?
Fair use as best I understand it is the idea that copyrighted material and intellectual property can be used in some cases without permission, usually meaning not having ti pay for rights to the material. The big cases when this is acceptable are for use in news coverage, critical analysis, parody, and of course, education. Anyone who has ever gone to school knows what this looks like; copied pages or select passages from some other book, playing a clip from a documentary or some historical speech, or even showing a full movie on the grounds of educational need. Speaking strictly in the educational realm, this allows teachers and districts to save money while still using a comprehensive set of materials in their classroom. If a teacher only wants to use a chapter or two from another book, why should the school spend hundreds of dollars on an entire set of the books for a mere 15 page article used for one lesson? Granted, that section will most likely be used more than just the one year, but that doesn't the justify spending the money on numerous copies of the book.
At the same time however, as a writer myself, I understand the value of my intellectual property and would hate to see a short story of mine being used without proper consent or reimbursement of some kind of my entire work was taken wholesale. For example, if a teacher were to use a poem of mine or a part of a short story in her lesson (assuming of course my writing career has taken off!) I have no objection. However, if I were to publish the comic book I am currently writing and a teacher were to copy the entire book and distribute copies to her students, I would feel infringed upon, considering the going rate for a 32-page comic never exceeds 4 dollars, unless we're talking about a special edition or incentive cover, which is a story for another day.
The long and short of it is, I understand, and I don't all at the same time. While I will agree that violating terms of use on programs or peer-to-peer sharing is an offense that needs to be monitored and policed by the district and self-enforced by each teacher, using fair use allows to create a more comprehensive list of material to be used in lessons. If a teacher were to buy every book for which they took a page out of or used a segment from an anthology, teachers would be drowning in debt and have personal libraries that may very well rival the school library. The idea of intellectual property is an issue constantly in flux, and one that needs to be monitored and tracked as it changes. That said, while I wold never steal someone's full intellectual property or use it for my own gain, if my students can learn something more from a passage in a book I own for a lesson, I don't see a problem with it.
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