The advent of YouTube and the file-sharing wars have certainly awakened plenty of college students to the importance of copyright law. But many students still do not understand even the barest fundamentals of copyright, according to a new study conducted by professors at American University and its Washington College of Law.
For the study, researchers polled 51 graduate-level students and 15 undergraduates who have uploaded videos to YouTube. Those students, the study reports, were “universally underinformed and misinformed about the law.” For example, about three out of four thought that fair-use doctrine protected their YouTube posts, but none could define the doctrine. One student argued that inserting the phrase “all rights reserved” into a copyrighted clip would indemnify him from infringement claims, according to Broadcasting & Cable.
Students aren’t necessarily to blame for their lack of clarity on copyright, though. Fair-use doctrine — and, in fact, most of copyright law — is infamously foggy, and it would be folly to expect students to demonstrate expertise on such a contentious topic. —Brock Read
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