Week 8's reading reflection

Week8’s reading reflection: Hong Kong’s Amended Copyright Low
Guide for Teachers and Students
http://www.ipd.gov.hk/eng/intellectual_property/copyright/edu_guide.pdf.

No matter when I was a middle school English teacher, or as a student at present, I always thought that copyright was a word that was far from my everyday life and had little business with me until I acquired some knowledge form this course. Frankly speaking, this is also the first time I learn something about copyright from the aspect of teachers and student.

This leaflet emphasizes some changes brought to the Copyright Ordinance that affect teachers and students. These changes aim to instruct teachers and students to make accurate, legal and fair use of copyright words for teaching and learning purposes without breading copyright.

Four sections about fair dealing(41A), scanning and photocopying(45), performance, play of audio and video recordings at an educational establishment(43), liberalization in the use of parallel imports(35B) are discussed in this leaflet.

I want to talk about some of my own experiences relevant to some points of this leaflet:

As the unfair examples of acts dealing with a copyright work listed under 41A Fair dealing, the act that a student copying the whole or a large portion of a textbook because he believe the textbook is too expensive is unfair. Actually, the textbooks are really expensive here in Hong Kong comparing with the textbooks that I used in Mainland China. But an interesting thing is that I always buy books although they are expensive in Hong Kong, while in the mainland I did copy the whole portion of some textbooks and sometimes copying a book was usually more expensive than buying a book. What I want to say is that the situation about copyright is quite different between Hong Kong and Mainland China. In the mainland, people seldom take copyright into consideration when they do copying about hardcopies or downloading about on-line resources. I think firstly it is because the promotion of copyright is not enough, people don’t appreciate it and lack the knowledge of copyright, which means they don’t know what kind of acts follow or offend the copyright: secondly, there doesn’t exist effective institutions to supervise or restrict acts involved in copyright. Actually, there are rich freely downloadable resources including audios, videos or PDF file online.
The other example described another unfair act which confused me a lot, that is a teacher playing a DVD of a currently shown movie in class for students’ entertainment after exams were over. I don’t know why this act is unfair. The aim is for entertainment, so what is the difference between the students see a shown movie in a cinema or in a classroom? I will be quite sure students would enjoy more about the same movie when watching in class after exams with other classmate than watching in a cinema.