At a time when online digital technologies are enabling users to create and share an ever-widening array of multimedia texts, educators increasingly fear being harassed by media companies, and this is stifling innovation in the use of digital media as instructional tools, contends Renee Hobbs, of Temple University, in a March 12 article in Education Week.

Hobbs is co-author of a new report, "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy," that reveals media-literacy teachers are afraid to share their innovative practices with other educators, or to post materials online or distribute samples of their students’ work. This fear also prompts many teachers to deny their students the right to quote from creative expressions that are now a central part of contemporary culture when completing classroom projects and assignments. As a result, students do not learn a fundamental truth: Copyright is designed not only to protect the rights of owners, but also to preserve the ability of users to promote creativity and innovation.

Fear and misinformation also limit teachers’ use of the Internet and related digital technologies. Many instructors want to use YouTube as a classroom teaching tool, for example, but often find they can’t because it’s blocked by school filters. Some circumvent the blocks to screen videos, but remain uncertain about whether this is legal. Others warn their students not to post their video-production assignments online. As a consequence, the innovative instructional practices of media literacy—practices that combine critical analysis of media “texts” with creative media-production activities—are not being widely shared.

Hobbs says that “fair use is the venerable copyright doctrine that permits reasonable quotation of copyrighted works without permission or payment when the benefit to society outweighs the harm to the copyright holder. It is a legal doctrine that is far more available to teachers than is currently understood or practiced.”

She further contends that educators don’t have to live with the self-imposed strictures of copyright confusion. They can begin standing up for their rights as users of copyrighted material, in the same way other creative communities have. To help them, media-literacy educators are beginning the process of developing a code of practices that will articulate how fair use applies to our work. Over the next year, watch for lesson plans and multimedia curriculum materials to help teachers introduce the concepts of copyright and fair use in their classrooms.

Read the report…