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Priority of Legal Issues vs.
Priority of Educational Issues

For Priority of Legal Issues:	At every construction site is a barrier someplace that says something like, "Do not enter." We have a problem in that many of us go around that barrier -- the barrier that says, "You can't do this with Benson's cartoon today." (I didn't see it today, but any day, perhaps.) Or, "You can't take a song by Meatloaf, if you wish to, and make it the background for a Powerpoint show." Am I getting in anybody's territory now? Or, a poem by Maya Angelou to stimulate a discussion on poetry. Or, JPEG likenesses of Mssrs. Bush and Gore that you took off of the L.A. Times home page to bring across a point in your political science class. Or, an editorial from The Arizona Republic that you clip out -- an editorial on alternative fuel cars -- copy it and give it to class members. Or, you simply take an image of Shaquille O'Neal or Madonna to send to someone as an e-mail attachment across the country. And yet all of those things I have just mentioned we as educators do, and every one of those things may be against the law. The issue is, we need to follow what the fair use copyright law is. As you can see, I am in favor of following the law...
For Priority of Educational Issues:	I'm a teacher. My primary role is to engage students, to get them to learn, to find the most effective way to get them to understand complex issues. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not interested in the fine points of copyright. I want to be able to find the best tools that I can use for students, and use them in my classroom in ways that help them learn. And I don't want to be told that I have to spend huge amounts of money in order to buy the "rights" to something that is useful in my classroom, just to fill the pockets of somebody who wants to sell it to me.
For Priority of Legal Issues:	She probably has Napster in her classroom as well. [audience laughs]
For Priority of Educational Issues:	Now, the Napster group is called, actually, the Music Listeners' Rights Act. It's a little different thing than the recording organizations.'
For Priority of Legal Issues:	She doesn't want to be bothered by the law. She doesn't want to have to line someone else's pocket, or pockets. It's true that Willie Nelson is still making money from "Crazy." But it's also true that [my opponent] might someday write something that she would like to gain the money from. And when she does, I'm going to use it without even thinking about it.
For Priority of Educational Issues:	I would never ask you to pay me for something... I would expect you to give me credit for something I had created. But as a teacher, what I do all the time is create instructional materials. And I am more than willing to have you use them whenever you would like. I expect you to say that you got them from me.
For Priority of Legal Issues:	I probably will say that. What she might not realize, as she's thinking about breaking the law, is that it's not that hard to stay within the law. The first instance is that what all of us are going to do primarily has to do with education, not with making a profit. And so there's a very good chance that without a lot of effort on her part, or on the part of any of us, that she might be inside the law simply because of the purpose that she wishes to make of this item, this information.
For Priority of Educational Issues:	But I'm never exactly sure. And when I go to my friends, the librarians, or I go to the Copy Center, and I want to do something for my class, I have to sign a form that says I personally am taking responsibility that I have gotten permission to use this material. Or my friends, the librarians, say, "There aren't public performance rights on that videotape that has the perfect ten-minute piece that you want to use in your classroom." So every time I'm thinking about the perfect instructional tool in my classroom, I am met with barrier, after barrier, after barrier. If I had a full-time secretary whose job it was to find and get permission for me to use these things, and a budget to pay for those rights, it would be great. But I don't know about you, but I don't have that.
For Priority of Legal Issues:	Until she gets that full-time secretary -- which may be the one that you want to put for the next year's goal -- until she gets that full-time secretary, she's going to have to live within the law by not using that which is perfect, and using the teacher's discretion to find something else which is not protected by copyright and not protected by trademark, and use that in the classroom. Sorry!
For Priority of Educational Issues:	Well, I suppose I'm willing to take the risk. The institution, in some ways, forces me to take that risk. It wants me to be a teacher, but it makes me take responsibility for the fact that I might be having to choose between that perfect, timely instructional activity that really meets my students' needs, and these laws that are in many ways outdated, ready to be re-defined. If I want to put my course on-line, how in the world am I going to be able to find instructional materials for my students that don't require me either to pay for them or somehow require me to tip-toe around laws that are outdated?
For Priority of Legal Issues:	You need to get a full-time secretary. [audience laughs.] Actually, it's not as hard as we might think. It simply takes a little attention to the idea of what it is that we're going to use this for. What's the nature of the material? If she's looking for something -- or if you're looking for something -- that's fiction, that puts the nature of it into less of a fair-use situation than something that's nonfiction, such as a newspaper account or a magazine account. And so that may make it far easier than [my opponent] thinks.
For Priority of Educational Issues:	Why should I even have to think about that at all? My goal is to be an effective teacher in the classroom for my students. Why should I have to be concerned about what I consider to be trivial intellectual property issues?
For Priority of Legal Issues:	That's probably because you're going to have to re-define what your role as a teacher is. [audience laughs]
For Priority of Educational Issues:	I want to cover the content!
For Priority of Legal Issues:	Part of our role as instructors, as educators, is to model for those folks who are in our classroom. None of us would probably accept plagiarism as something we would like coming into us as an assignment. Is it far afield from plagiarism to suggest that if we go to so-and-so's web site and take their material and bring it back to our web site or bring it to the classroom... That seems to me that we're modeling plagiarism.
For Priority of Educational Issues:	There's a difference between giving credit, and paying money for the use of something that's going to help in the classroom.
[The group of attendees is invited to contribute any point they wish to add to either side of the debate.]
Group Contributor 1:	I really like your position. I think perhaps we should provide our students with copies of whole textbooks written on academic subjects. That's a marvelous idea. Let's give them credit, and not the money. [audience laughs and applauds]
Group Contributor 2:	I just wanted to say that it seems that the government has tried to enforce the laws that are no longer feasible and it has pretty much universally been a bad idea. I think the Internet has really changed the way we need to look at copyright laws and has made it an irreversible situation. Something has to change.
For Priority of Legal Issues:	You have a point, but is that a little bit like the First Amendment -- that we like it only for ourselves and not for anyone else? I'm not sure.
Group Contributor 2:	The bottom line is, whether what you say is true or not, copyright laws are unenforcable. Would you have someone in every classroom to monitor whether [your opponent] is following the copyright law?
For Priority of Educational Issues:	Actually, students can turn me in for a bounty, as a matter of fact. No, I'm making it clear that I'm just arguing for the supremacy of education in this particular instance. I think in schools and colleges and universities, the classroom is a special instance.
[The debate period ends, and the group's discussion and reporting activity in response to this issue is initiated.] Write an additional rebuttal for either side Proceed to: More Commentary on Fair Use Issues Return to: Introduction to Fair Use Issues Danger in the Construction Zone Contents WebDev 2000 Contents