Copyright

Each time I distribute exams to my students I remind them that they should do the work on their own, and that copying or talking will earn them a zero on their exam. After reading more about copyright laws, I am starting to realize that I may in fact be breaking copyright laws every single day in my classroom. At the start of the year I was given a workbook, from which I have been making numerous photocopies from to distribute to my students for practice. Not once did I even think that there was anything wrong with what I was doing. My students needed to practice the problems, and I didn't think twice about whether or not I could be breaking any copyright laws. Apparently, I was. Workbooks are supposed to be written in by students, and are only to be filled out once by one student. What was the point of my school giving me this one workbook if I am legally not allowed to make copies from it to distribute to my students? Was I supposed to come up with my own problems and type up my own worksheets? Perhaps. Now that I am aware of the fact that what I have been doing for the past six months is not allowed, do I keep doing it anyway, under the assumption that nothing is going to happen to me.

Who is going to track down, and watch to make sure that copyright laws are not being broken? I'm sure if whoever was in charge of this could go around finding everyone in violation of copyright laws the courts would be booked for an extremely long time. Perhaps, so long that many people might never have to show up in court. Now there are many other problems going on in this world, much bigger than copyright laws, and maybe that is the reason why they haven't been revised in 1998. With the access to information in today's world being so easily accessible, how do we keep the integrity of these copyright laws in place, and prevent people from continuously breaking copyright laws each day? In some regards, people don't really see the copying that they are doing as wrong, and maybe they have valid points in their own minds' but that does not make it right.

Where do we draw the line so that these copyright laws can actually be effective? As humans if we get away with something we are going to be enticed to continue to try to get away with what we are doing, even if we are punished down the road, because we knew we got away with it before. When the government started coming down on people for illegally downloading music do you really think that those people that were caught started buying CDs and did not illegally obtain music ever again. I highly doubt they suddenly started purchasing every single song they wanted to hear. Unless breaking copyright laws becomes something very difficult to ever get away with I don't think they will be effective to an extent that those who wrote the law intended it.