Media literacy is controversial because it is difficult to make the exact definition in our daily lives using the Internet. According to the article, “The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education” by Center for Social Media, Intellectual Property is supported by the law. Its copyright protects itself from other people’s use except for the fair-use. However, the definition of fair-use is vague.
There are a lot of unknown copyrighted works in the file sharing sites. Movie, game, music, e.t.c, various types of files are uploaded by anonymous without any permissions by the owner of their copyrights. However, the users of file sharing sites can excuse about such a situation because private using is allowed by the fair-use. They can say they enjoy them as private purpose. At the same time, they don’t break the rule of that the other people must not get any profits by using the copyrighted works as long as they upload files free. Even though the Megaupload was shut down because of their illegal profits, many other barely legal file sharing services are still alive.
As a result, it’s difficult to make a perfect definition of the fair-use. As long as people use the Internet, this dilemmatic problem exists. To solve this environment of the Internet world, the clear strict guidelines about the fair-use for media literacy are required.
