The thing that REALLY stood out for me as I listened to the release conference yesterday was that this release is only the FIRST STEP…educators need to step up (as you have) and encourage folks to download the statement and start to talk about it. We need to stop feeling threatened by the so called “rules” and reclaim our rights under Fair Use. National Council of Teachers of English has adopted the statement released yesterday and from the section entitled THE TYRANNY OF GUIDELINES AND EXPERTS states…
Today, some educators mistakenly believe that the issues covered in the fair use principles below are not theirs to decide. They believe they must follow various kinds of “expert” guidance offered by others. In fact, the opposite is true. The various negotiated agreements that have emerged since passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 have never had the force of law, and in fact, the guidelines bear little relationship to the actual doctrine of fair use. Sadly, as legal scholar Kenneth Crews has demonstrated in “The Law of Fair Use Guidelines,” The Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 602-700, many publications for educators reproduce the guidelines uncritically, presenting them as standards that must be adhered to in order to act lawfully. Experts (often non-lawyers) give conference workshops for K-12 teachers, technology coordinators, and library or media specialists where these guidelines and similar sets of purported rules are presented with rigid, official-looking tables and charts. At the same time, materials on copyright for the educational community tend to overstate the risk of educators being sued for copyright infringement — and in some cases convey outright misinformation about the subject. In effect, they interfere with genuine understanding of the purpose of copyright — to promote the advancement of knowledge through balancing the rights of owners and users.

In fact, this is an area in which educators themselves should be leaders rather than followers. Often, they can assert their own rights under fair use to make these decisions on their own, without approval. In rare cases where doing so would bring them into conflict with misguided institutional policies, they should assert their rights and seek to have those policies changed. More generally, educators should share their knowledge of fair use rights with library and media specialists, technology specialists, and other school leaders to assure that their fair use rights are put into institutional practice.

I encourage folks to JOIN THE WIKI and become advocates for their educational rights under fair use.