Last year I begrudgingly attended a conference session on copyright. Up to that point, I operated in my school under the assumption that materials acquired in schools were reproducible, distributable, and consumable under the auspices of "fair use." The session leader quickly brought me to the realization that I had been modeling the wrong behavior for my students. Both in word and conduct, I had unwittingly violated the legal rights of artists. What was worse, I had been allowing my students to do the same. After the conference, I researched intellectual property right laws for schools in Germany. I gathered enough information to introduce intellectual property issues to my 9th grade technology students for their last movie-making project of the year. My motto for copyrighted material was, "get permission first!"
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