Wk2 Wimba: Copyright Issues

The issues of copyright are really complex and even dangerous in a workplace. In some workplace, someone else decides what you are supposed to do about copyright (like in my workplace). I'm sure some other workplaces give you freedoms in what to choose, and put the responsibility on you when you make a bad call. Before going into a master course system (in which you, an instructional designer, makes the course and give limited rights to the faculty), we had many courses that had a lot of copyright violations, and when we would fix them, the faculty would do a big stink about it. They would say that they had an "academic freedom" to present any number of copyrighted items without repercussion. It wasn't even about fair use, they thought it was a right. I heard one faculty member say that if he was using copyrighted material and was caught, that our college should pay with no repercussion to him as many times as it took to teach the course. As absurd as that may sound, we battled with him, until he retired not long ago. I wasn't in the Wimba for the first part, so I just wanted to talk about my situation at work.
I saw that many of my classmates had doubts about the use of materials in their classrooms. And there is a disparaging in the different schools budgets, so I know that getting an account with a music library and a photo/video library is out of the question. But as we read in the book, all of this is invented or a game. Why not getting a fund raising with kids for a photo library, and let the kids make a collage of pictures to be hung in the school halls? Or with a music library, and make original CDs with parts of a music library? When I was in middle school, I got into a fund raiser to go to an amusement park, and I sold enough chocolates for my whole class to go (about 36 boxes of chocolate in 45 days). And that was for a one time thing. If I knew that I was doing it for access to a music library for all year, I would do it all over again in a flash. I'm only talking about the easiest route to avoid copyright issues, so I know there would be a lot of different opinions about this. I would love to hear more about your stories of how you avoided copyright issues, besides using open-source or freeware or fair use.