The issues of copyright are definitely important in protecting creators to allow a financially viable career. The thing that spoke to me the most was the particularly sensitive nature of how copyright is used, how it is misunderstood and ultimately the trouble that most people and organizations can get into in breaking copyright law.
The fair use concept plays a significant role in music education. For my occupation, the controversy over protecting creator property while at the same time being able to teach with the flexibility of fair use practices is always a touchy thing. For example, students lose the music you hand out and when you legally purchase music, you are only buying a certain amount of parts per instrument. It is a practicality to create temporary copies of music by many educators although technically prohibited by copyright law to ensure your students are provided the necessary materials.
The obvious problem is that a school does not have a budget to constantly buy music when students lose it and still be able to afford everything else. Musical copyright for schools has allowed specific temporary uses of copies in the event of back ordered music and out of print music but of course, still based on permission.
My personal experience has been finding the trouble of having all original music with students when they partake in individual and small group competitions or even large group for that matter. Most if not all state music organizations require original music to be in hand at the time of the performance for competition. There are many penalties involved including disqualification when copyright has been observed as being broken.
What also intrigued me about the reading was how technology is constantly pushing ahead of federal legislation in redefining how copyright pertains to re-mixing. This technically has been around for quite some time. The artistic genre of the collage is based on the principle of combining other pre-created materials and making a new piece of art with it.
I remember being in school and cutting out magazine imagery for the purposes of designing a composited image from found artifacts. The result being a new piece of work but ultimately not 100% original beings that the materials were appropriated from other sources albeit without permission.
Culturally I appreciate the point of view that our collective society being social in nature thrives through the sharing of documents and ideas and it is inevitable that material created by others would be appropriated for the purposes of sharing. It also seems that there will always be a sub-culture that chooses to appropriate material at will without any thought or care of how this financially affects the industries that create the material in the first place.
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