Copyright.

I believe that copyright is important because it allows the creator of something to be able to share and publish their work without having to worry about someone else taking it, altering it, or making profit off of it. Perhaps this encourages creativity by ensuring that the creator will have exclusive ownership for a good while, long enough to potentially earn some profit for their labor.

I think it's important for us as teachers to understand these laws so that we can take advantage of the many resources available out there (to save us time while providing our students with the best materials possible), while not running into legal problems with copyright infringement. But, in the case of education, it's nice to have Fair Use laws on our side. Knowing how to properly use them can be a great benefit when we need to talk about or quickly examine some copyrighted work.

To find materials in the public domain there are a few search engines that help (e.g. http://www.publicdomainworks.net, etc.)... but it's perhaps easier to use the Creative Commons or Fair Use rather than figuring out whether it's copyrighted if it was made after 1923.

I like the Creative Commons. I think it's a great way to share our ideas and projects and pictures and all other things from which we have no intention of making a profit. It makes it easy to establish the amount of control that we want to retain over our work. And it makes it especially easy to know how we can use someone else's work. I started using flickr after our PLN assignment, and I have appreciated how easily they have integrated the Creative Commons licenses into our uploading of images. It makes it so simple, where otherwise I would be totally lost.