CSE 619:

Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi helped me get a better sense of what is and is not copyright. In high school I was taught about copyright and how to site sources. It got a little trickier when there were different ways to site sources. It helped when Microsoft Word allowed me to choose what form of sighting sources I needed.

When reading this book the part that I did not know from before reading this book was the concept of ‘Fair Use.’ I believe that there is a very thin line between what is considered plagiarism or just, now what I know is called, fair use. I like that there were many examples of actual situations where directors or writers had to figure out if and when they needed ask permission to use other pieces of other work.

While writing this blog post I had a really difficult time making sure that what I am writing will not be considered plagiarism. It is helpful when examples are given that help me put what is being said into a different way of looking at things. For an example, there is a quote in the book that says, “They called them “skeletons”-courses so bare that they were unhelpful teaching tools-and “Swiss cheese”- full of holes where crucial copyrighted material had been removed”  (Jaszi, 2011). When authors use illustrative words or a food/object so I am able to place that picture in my head and make those connections to the text.

It is quite interesting the process that people have to go through in order to get permission to use a 10 second clip in a movie or something else that is not that big of a thing. It is a little funny to me to think of lawyers have to get involved and it can often be a long and windy process. There is also the added step of all the other people that need to get involve such as, supervisors, insurers, publishers, and other authority person.

I was watching a show on HGTV and the lady was a professional blogger. I did not know that there was such a thing because I do not understand how you can make money from that but then the reading for the past weeks got me thinking that people like professional bloggers need to be very careful what they post and how they post it. To me it would seem that doing something like being a professional blogger would be more work than is really necessary and I would want to do something that would not put all that pressure on myself.

However, to go along with the last paragraph, the same could be said about being a teacher because we as teachers need to make sure that we are covering our own tails when creating a lesson. I remember when I was doing my student teaching and I had all of these big ideas to do with my students and I had to think about sighting the sources that I would be using. It is sad to say that some of my big ideas I changed because the sighting of it was a little too complicated than was really necessary for that particular lesson. It was also a recurring theme within my classes that my teachers encouraged us to use things that we found elsewhere and less time trying to make something up on our own.

I really took away a lot from this book and I am excited to have it as a reference point in my other assignments.