Copyright and Fair Use

The article found at http://www.techlearning.com/article/17674 discusses copyright laws in general, and stresses their importance--especially in regards to educators.

14. On Back-to-School night, an elementary school offers child care for students' younger siblings. They put the kids in the library and show them Disney VHS tapes bought by the PTA. This is permissible.

The fact that this is not permissible seems rather draconian and purely profit-driven, rather than an attempt to product the rights of creators.

16. At a local electronics show, a teacher buys a machine that defeats the copy protection on DVDs, CD-ROMs, and just about everything else. She lets her students use it so they can incorporate clips from rented DVDs into their film genre projects. This is fair use.

I am surprised that this is the case. It seems to me that there are many inconsistencies in copyright law.

18. A student wants to play a clip of ethnic music to represent her family's country of origin. Her teacher has a CD that meets her needs. It is fair use for the student to copy and use the music in her project.

This makes sense. The use is purely educational, and I agree with the author comment on broadening use guidelines for music.

20. Last year, a school's science fair multimedia CD-ROM was so popular everyone wanted a copy of it. Everything in it was copied under fair use guidelines. It's permissible for the school to sell copies to recover the costs of reproduction.

I disagree with this not being fair use. If the multimedia was compiled under fair use (especially in an educational setting), should it not be allowed for resale as a legitimately different creation?

8. A student film buff downloads a new release from a Taiwanese Web site to use for a humanities project. As long as the student gives credit to the sites from which he's downloaded material, this is covered under fair use.

Clearly, this should be false. I have no problem with this not being fair use, because all the student is doing is citing his illegitimate means of acquiring the media.

5. A geography teacher has more students and computers than software. He uses a CD burner to make several copies of a copyright interactive CD-ROM so each student can use an individual copy in class. This is fair use.

This falls under the same category as the Disney movies not being allowed to be showed to groups of children. Its only purpose seems to be to bolster the profits of the creator. To add to that, this is for educational purposes.