This article describes briefly the important points in the amended HK Copyright Ordinance, in particular addressing the education issues. I think this can provide some very useful guidelines to teachers in preparing education materials without infringing the Copyright Ordinance. As noted in the amended Ordinance, a new "fair dealing" exemption is introduced to facilitate modern teaching in incorporating authentic materials such as extracts from newspaper and journals.
In the amended copyright law, some examples of "fair dealing" have been given, but still there is no specific definition. Probably due to the fact that it is very difficult to lay down a specific definition and in practice has to consider case by case according to the circumstances. Nevertheless, this articles did provide some very interesting examples such as alerting teachers not to play a currently shown movie in class for students' entertainment purposes rather than education purposes.
All in all, teachers must be cautious in adopting any authentic materials for education purposes, as the copyright issue is a sensitive matter nowadays. It would be embarrassing to an educational establishment if its teaching staff is charged for an offence in infringing copyright even due to carelessness.
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