So it's kind of hard for me to be an English teacher and to have to deal with copyright issues.  I know, it sounds like such a joke, right?  I teach English, I should be all about citations and bibliographies and all of that.  Well here's the thing: with copyright laws, I never really know exactly HOW MUCH credit I need to give in order to not break the law.  And now that we're talking about it, I'm sitting here going nuts and getting paranoid, thinking I've broken the law already fifty thousand times in the last week! ;-*  Hopefully it hasn't actually been THAT bad.  But really, I get worried sometimes.  Anyway, I decided to post a few videos I found interesting, and I'll show what I liked about them and didn't like--me, being the teacher who hates copyright infringment of any kind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBHkQZHSiZE&feature=related

In this video, the creator gives credit for each of the song titles and tells where each song comes from (as in which movie they're from).  However, there's no credit given to the singers, songwriters, movie producers, or anyone else who took part in making that clip that she has just used.  It's assumed she is showing all Disney films because of the title of her video (Top 10 Favorite Disney Songs), but after that, there's no more credit given.  Shouldn't there be more somewhere?  Shouldn't there be someone else who receives some benefit from this?  She really is only using the video to entertain other people, and I don't see much educational value in it as it stands now.  Therefore, it's breaking copyright laws for not giving credit and for posting this footage online in a non-educational or benefitting societal way.  But who knows, maybe she did actually pay someone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_soUdHNwFgk

I love this student group's video for The Giver, and I thought it was a fabulous representation of something I could actually use in my classroom--I might have my students do this same kind of project, actually.  I really liked the original photography and cinematography the group used, but I noticed one major problem.  They had a song playing in the background (from Coldplay, I think) that they never cited.  Probably that should have been mentioned somewhere in their video, just giving a little bit of credit.  It fit really well with the video, but when they don't give credit, it breaks copyright laws.