The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Over the past couple of years we have heard a lot about media literacy and how the Internet makes intellectual property theft and redistribution of ideas, games, music, movies, and invention schematics extremely easy. The thing that makes it easy is the extremely vague definition of fair-use and the moral grey areas that it opens up with it. Its thanks to these moral grey areas that a lot of today’s controversy exists. As stated in the article, “The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education” by Center for Social Media, Intellectual Property is protected by law and the punishment for violating said law is a court set jail time for the perpetrator of the crime. But sometimes individuals find loopholes to the laws as I’ve stated earlier, some morally grey individuals duplicate copyright materials and post them up on quasi-legal sites such as filebox, megaupload, fileserve, and 4shared.com, unfortunately for the owner of that copy right information this what appears to be illegal private redistribution of goods and services is mandated as legal the fair-use. Pirates and Intellectual Property thieves exploit this weakness by stating that they enjoy these goods and services for private purposes. As a result, it’s almost impossible to directly define fair-use. As long as the Internet exists this problem will always plague the original owners of copyright material. The only feasible solution I can think of to this problem is to redefine fair-use in a less loosely interpreted manner.