Cautious Copyright

Throughout this semester in TPTE 486 we have learned a lot about copyright. Because I have learned so much about this topic, I decided to write about it for one of my choice blog posts. At the beginning of this summer, I was not aware that copyright laws were so strict. For example, I though if you Googled an image, copied it, pasted it on your website, and told your readers where you got the image from, it was not considered a copyright infringement. Now that I have been in TPTE 486 for a few weeks, I understand that this is not the case. I was surprised to learn that simply citing the source for the information is not enough. Throughout the semester, I have learned that there are limits to how much copyrighted material you can use. For example, I have learned you can only use ten percent or 1,000 words of text from another source without breaking a copyright law. I have also learned that you cannot use over ten percent or thirty seconds of a music clip or ten percent or three minutes of a video clip on your website without breaking the copyright law. Honestly, I am surprised I was never taught this before taking this class. In all of my English classes in high school and college, we were always taught that if we cited who the author was and where we got the information from, we were not plagiarizing someone's work. According to everything we have learned in TPTE 486, this is not necessarily true when you are publishing works on the internet. In taking this class, I have learned how to avoid copyright infringements. For example, I now understand that taking your own photographs with a digital camera or getting images from a free image database is the best way to avoid copyright issues with images. Even though there are many important things we have learned in this class this summer, I think the information we have learned about copyright laws may be one of the most important. I am glad I was taught about copyright laws during my pre-service teacher program because I think it would be very unprofessional if I were to get in trouble with my future school system for having copyrighted material on my classroom website.