Frank Hruska's Trivial Information

After reading and watching videos on how copyright law works I found it surprising how easy it is to get permission to use copyrighted material.  In most cases as long as you are not making a profit off of copy righted material it is fair use as long as credit is given to the creator.  The two things I enjoyed learning about was that for teaching and parody copyright laws are relaxed.  I knew parody and homage had some lead way but after doing research if you are mocking or commenting on copyrighted material you are in the clear.  I found this funny as copyrighted material is okay with being made fun of but not okay with being duplicated.  Also, the term teaching is what I would have questions about.  The internet as I have stated before is still in the process of making rules.  Can I download a movie and say I downloaded the copyrighted material to teach me about the contents of the movie?  It is a sarcastic argument but one that has actually held up and created numerous problems for copyright holders.  My personal experience with copyrights is I write for an SEO company.  I elaborated in a previous post about how much trouble we go through to make sure everything is fair use.  I can only imagine what news rooms or bigger media companies must go through to avoid complications.  The specific example I like to use though is how many people are creating media for free.  A lot of people are creating big label quality projects on low budgets out of their houses.  They do this for the reputation then hopefully money.  Big labels fight hard to protect their copyrights as now anyone can create media.