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As a result, there are intellectual property laws that are so routinely ignored that they have become meaningless—and enforcing them makes librarians appear to be martinets.

Making free copies of copyrighted online materials and passing them out to students, downloading digital videos (such as YouTube’s) onto a local hard drive, and converting analog materials to digital formats to be used with an interactive whiteboard or slide-show software for whole group instruction are all regularly done by teachers. These uses have either no or minimal impact on a copyright holder’s profits. Overly strict enforcements of the letter of copyright laws will lead to creating scofflaws of not just students, but teachers, and make all copyright restrictions suspect.

Until something is proven illegal, assume it’s legal.

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education outlines five principles, each with limitations: Educators can, under some circumstances: 1. Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use. 2. Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded. 3. Share, sell and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded. Learners can, under some circumstances: 4. Use copyrighted works in creating new material. 5. Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

The Code, video and other curriculum materials for educators are available at http://centerforsocialmedia.org/medialiteracy and can also be found at http://mediaeducationlab.com/.