My opinions and experiences about copyright

   To be honest, almost all the policies, laws, regulations and other things about copyright are new to me. I thought about this very rarely before because I think it is too much work to think about that issue. However, the more I learned, the more I understand. It is really important to protect people’s work. This is because we need to encourage people to create more work and they deserve respects and protection. Maybe things are becoming more complex when we are using others’ work considering of the copyright issue. But that is nothing comparing with the effort of the creator.It is like the author mentioned here, I cannot understand a lot of issues in this area. I never think that if I only use a person’s work to limited members is illegal. In my opinion, no mater how many people you are showing, to the author is the same: they deserve the copyright of their work and users need to get permission. But I do think that if I gave credits to the authors, then I can use their works before. This is wrong too. Furthermore, I never think the copyright has more than five hundred years of history. No matter the works is published or not, they are always under the protection of the copyright law. I think as a students most of the purpose of using other’s work is for studying, so it is not that hard and complex to get the permission. I have the experiences of getting permissions from some other people for my capstone project through emails. So I learned a lot here. Copyright is not only an issue that needs to be concerned by professionals, everyone needs to obey this law and everyone is under its protection.I really did not realize that it is also so complex about the ways that educational institutions have set up faculty rights in being authors of online content: so many options. J·         I prefer to choose the way of sharing the authorship with the college:·         It is easy to deal with. The college does not need to write to me to ask for the permissions of using my work. And I also can use it freely.·         It is fair that the college has the same right with employers to the works that created during the employment because the colleges financial support employers during the creating time.·         It is also good to the education area and benefits everyone. I mean as a former employee you agree with the new faculty to use your stuff and as a current employee you are allowed to use other’s work who worked in your current position before you. So everyone is saving time and benefits from it.Undoubtedly, I support this bill. I think it is very great, not only for the educators, but also for everyone in the country: everyone will benefit form education. In fact, I think copyright law should open the free door for the whole education—- not only to the distance learning. But if the educational using is an exception of the copyright may cause some problems of abusing the copyright law. Generally speaking, I think this bill is acceptable and benefit to the society is greater than the negative side—-online teaching is a part of education.I am doing my capstone now and I also have experience of creating a tutorial last semester which both need using a lot of materials from internet. I have been told from all the professors about the copyright. I have kind of feeling that obey the copyright law is one of the requirements for my graduation. It is also part of the knowledge that I need to learn from school. I feel that most of the people who own the work are easy to talk to get the permission as soon as you are agree to give the credits to them, especially when it is for the teaching, learning or other education purpose.As what Dr. Wang mentioned in the question: sometimes you may get excited when you finally find what you want from internet and then go ahead to use it for you project. However, when you are ready to give the credits, you find that you forgot to write down the information about the authors or owners. I think keep an word doc in your jump drive and whenever you need to use any work from internet, the first thing is to copy the URL address to that doc and then when you decide to use it you can come back to get the information about either the author or owner. This is also what I am doing now and this suggestion is from my professor. At the beginning I thought it might be boring to do this, but now I feel comfortable to keep updating this doc. And I am happy to give credits to others.References:  Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of Distance education, Michael Simoson, 2000.Avoiding E-Class Suits: Balancing the Rights of Faculty and Colleges.Manzo, Kathleen KennedyBill Would Ease Copyright Limits for E-learning.Trotter, Andrew