Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons

     Before this class, I really had the bare minimum knowledge of all three of these important topics.  Finding out that each of these was more complicated and interesting than I had thought led me to want to learn more about each and make sure that I try to not violate any of these.  Understanding the complete definition of what Copyright means is going to prevent me and any of my future students from accidentally pirating or using someone else's information.  Knowing that it is having the legal right to a certain piece of information, song, etc. makes it easier for people to avoid using it or asking for permission for it.  Fair Use, is quoting someone else's information and using it in a piece of work that you are creating.  This will be helpful to learn more about this when teaching my students or having them do some sort of research project and need to provide facts that they cannot come up with on their own.  Finally, Creative Commons was an organization that was recently formed that encouraged the sharing of artistic work.  Teaching my future students about all of these different concepts will help them to prevent new laws to be passed such as SOPA and PIPA.  In the future when I am writing my personal statement, doing research on a particular disability or something of that matter I will be sure to use my knowledge of these concepts to assure that I do not violate any laws or not give proper credit for information that I got from the internet or other sources.