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Lack of copyright education in schools affect all |
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Written by Felix Da Silva (fdasilva@bitnip.com)
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Friday, 26 October 2007 |
 A recent report from the Center for Social Media at American University found that confusion over using copyrighted material in the classroom was
affecting teachers' attempts to train students to be critical of media.
According to the report here (PDF), copyright confusion is running rampant in American schools. The teachers don't know what is going on and
media literacy is now being "compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions
and lack of understanding about copyright law."
Teachers interviewed for this study showed a wide range of coincidence about their copyright knowledge. Some talked about plagiarism and copyright in ways that suggested they were interchangeable concepts. Most participants in our research study had numerous questions about what is permitted under the law.
One teacher, for example, has his students create mash ups that mix pop music and
news clips to comment on the world around them. Unfortunately for the students,
the school "doesn't show them on the school's closed-circuit TV system" because
"it might be a copyright violation."
Educators have also received substantial informal education on copyright, of a more general kind, through their exposure to a barrage of fear-inducing stories about intellectual property from the mass media, as a result of the entertainment industries’ campaigns against “piracy” in general and file sharing in particular. Newspaper articles about file sharing and copyright infringement cases are information resources for interviewees, as well as the FBI warnings at the beginning of films and the posted warnings at the photocopy store.
Hopefully this report will help highlight the importance of copyright education in schools. It is not just to know what is permissible in copyright but according to most teachers interviewed, they believed that the use of contemporary mass media materials also helps them connect new ideas to students’ existing knowledge base. As one interviewee put it, “Teaching is just better when we can pull from a lot of different sources.”
It won't be long until copyright or intellectual property will be a subject in school. If I had kids, I will definitely enroll them in those classes as they will learn to be more critical of the media and learn something that they can actually use in this intellectual property dominated world.
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