Week1 Free Reflection: Copyright in my Classroom

POST #4

LA County has a department for teacher tech training, and a few years ago I took their week-long beginning course (“OK, do all of you know how to turn on your computer?”).  Half a day was dedicated to the topic we’re studying this week, and the idea I came away with was that it was not okay to show “Mulan” in the auditorium to entertain kids on a rainy day, but it was okay to show it in your classroom as part of a unit on Chinese culture or women’s roles in society. 

While I’m pretty sure a teacher could definitely get by under the second conditions—even in Burbank, where there is doubtless at least one kid whose parent works for Disney in most classes—this week’s videos have me questioning whether it’s legal or not.

This is applicable to me directly, right now.  I don’t have my kids read Hamlet.  As I’ve said before, I think Shakespeare would roll over in his grave if he knew we were locking teenagers in classrooms and making them read his scripts.  Shakespeare is most available to us today in films, and that’s how I’ve taught Hamlet for years.  I show students both the Olivier Hamlet and the Zepphirelli one with Mel Gibson (still, even after David Tanner, my favorite Hamlet), and maybe even some of Brannaugh’s if we have time.  Well, “show” might be the wrong word; it takes five or six weeks, with me and my magic clicker, to get through both films in class.  Because we’re not “watching” them as entertainment; we’re studying them as literature.  Yes, we’re studying Shakespeare, but we’re also studying the films as literature in and of themselves.  (Well, okay, probably Olivier’s more than Mel’s.)  But am I violating copyright laws to do so? 

If I’m addressing the films as literature rather than as supplementary material, or as entertainment, it is completely non-optional to show the film in its entirety.  And I do, from opening credits (in Olivier’s case) to closing ones.  How, I ask, is this different from reading Of Mice and Men?  Or perhaps, Sophie’s Choice?  Well, we bought the books, which I assume under copyright gives permission for every person who picks the book up to read it, not just the person who bought it.  I bought my copies of both films; does that give me the right to show them to anyone I wish, as long as it’s not for profit?  But what if I bought one of them on eBay?

One side of my brain says these questions are ridiculous.  The other says they’re what the word “legal” is all about.  The law, having not yet evolved to deal with the situation that actually exists now, and still somewhat subservient to those whose interests are not to conserve culture, history, or even artists’ rights but to conserve their own bank accounts, makes such questions extrememely pertinent.

In my second paragraph, my original sentence didn’t say “questioning whether it’s legal or not”—it said, “questioning whether it’s right or not.”  But as I wrote about what I’m doing in my classroom, I had to change that.  I really have no doubts about whether it’s right.  I have kids who come in thinking black and white movies are boring, and end up, some of them, making black and white videos of their own.  As I said in my first posting, “When circumstances pressure a law out of its original intention, it’s time for common sense to 'revolt,' and that time for this law has surely come.”  How much good stuff will we lose before the law catches up to life in the 21^st century?