Copyright or Copywrong?

As an English Composition instructor, I'm usually way more concerned with plagiarism than I am with copyright infringement. In the past, I have typically asked my students to create documents or presentations that only I or their classmates would see, so even if they used images or music that was not their own, I assumed it was okay because it was for noncommercial, nonpublic, educational purposes. I would like to have my students share their work in more public venues to possibly address some of the problems they write about and try to solve, but doing so creates a new problem in that it means I have to teach them how to avoid breaking copyright laws.

I have every intention of using the creative commons curriculum for teaching copyright that is offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as I start to navigate this new area of teaching, but I am a little concerned about teaching something that I still find so bewildering myself. On the one hand, I could just require my students to only use images and music that they find on the Creative Commons website for my assignments, but doing so dodges my responsibility for teaching them how to engage ethically with other people's work as a digital citizen.

It's just a sticky situation, though. I'm not much for downloading or remixing music, so the intricacies of that are a little lost on me, but when I think about patterns for crafts like knitting and crocheting, all of the potential problems become clear. On the one hand, ideas and processes aren't supposed to be protected by copyright, and what are patterns if not processes for achieving a particular idea? The actual photographs and written instructions seem like they would be protected, so that if I printed off copies of a pattern I found online and started selling them as if they were my own, that would be copyright infringement. But following the instructions to create something and then selling that product is less clear. (See this blog post for a more in-depth discussion of this issue). Then again, if I use sheet music written and copyrighted by someone else to play a song on my French Horn (and let's be honest, it's been so long since I played it that it likely won't sound exactly as intended), and I record that song without permission and share it widely, possibly for profit, I would be violating copyright, wouldn't I? Because that is also a procedure for creating art, but a procedure that requires an awful lot of knowledge, talent, and creativity to come up with. See, I'm even more confused as I continue to write.

I feel like the only safe bet is to just create all of my own content. Except then I have to worry about other people stealing my stuff without permission. Even if I do a Creative Commons license for my things, there's still a good chance that people will, knowingly or otherwise, use my creations in ways I did not intend. Suddenly I hear a member of a royal family singing something about not holding onto things (wink, wink). In other words, the ideal sharing environment would come with a lot of letting go: of expectations for financial gain, of control over what we are willing to share, but also of greed to profit off of what others have made. 

See. Still complicated.