Copyright Laws

I thought that most of the information we learned in the copyright lecture was interesting for the most part and could be very helpful to protect ourselves against a copyright lawsuit or sharing or pirating media through out the next couple years of college and then on into the business world. One piece of information that I found very interesting was that it is legal to use a piece or clip of a certain work of an author, but there is a lot of gray area there. For example, it is legal to use a quote or part of a paper or poem, but not to use a measure or any length of song clip. Many people involved in the creation or assessment of these laws though advise others not to fight these matters because the more laws the stickier and more complicated the copyright world will get. The two sides on this issue are, on the pro, it should be illegal to take bits of a song clip because songs are such short pieces of media that taking a clip of any length, no matter how short is still borrowing a large part of the media and for the most part the beat of the song is constant so it is kind of like you are taking the majority of the song. It would also be hard to set a limit of how long is acceptable to take, since again the average song length is not that long. Making it legal to use part of the song would also probably only add to the song pirating problem that already exists, it would be very hard to control. On the con side, if a person is using the song for educational purposes it should be allowed, or even if they are just using it for pleasure to get an idea of what the song sounds like it should be legal, they are not taking the entire song, just a clip. In my opinion, I think that it should stay illegal. I think it would be much harder to control the use of the clip than it is worth. It would add many unnecessary problems and I think that artists already have a tough enough time trying to make money off of any of their songs as it is with the extensive pirating/downloading media world.