Chapter 15: Important Stuff!!!

Copyright is increasingly important as more and more content becomes available on the web. Many artists, writers, musicians, and other content creators have had to come up with a plan for balancing the power of the web to publicize and disseminate works with protecting income-generating intellectual property. Even as those who create original content come to terms with this, our students are growing up creating content themselves by mashing up the works of others. I find that many younger folks have an expectation for anything and everything to be available on line and think nothing of "stealing" someone's work and labeling it as their own. Is this a new problem? Absolutely not. I remember reading many a president report, noticing a particularly well-written paragraph, and marching to the library to locate the same paragraph in the encyclopedia. What is new of course,  is the access to ever more and varied content to borrow. With many rap artists and others sampling music as the base of their new works of music we have a culture that says its ok, even cool to use the work of others. Now we have education websites inviting us to "steal these tools!" This is what makes copyright even grayer and more confusing than ever before and why this is one of Ohler's most important chapters.

I find the following most useful from chapter 15:

• Fair use--a great big help for educators. What would a history teacher do without Fair use? Under the fair use guidelines many photos and films are cleared for use in a classroom. We cited fair use when we asked for permissions to digitize the slides in our Marchand Archive for teacher use.
• Three rules of respect--citation, permission, compensation. This is mighty simple and mighty useful. Quite recently I know of someone who used someone else's work without permission and removed the citation which credited the producer of the work. To make matters worse, this person was compensated for doing this. The producer of the work was not. What do I say about this other than to be Captain Obvious myself and point out how disrespectful this was? It was also personally hurtful.I think these three little rules should be taught at a very young age.
• What Ohler pointed out about the dilemma of having students post their work online is one we will have to solve.

 If you ever have to teach your students about copyright, the Library of Congress has a self-paced online module that we use with teachers and find very useful.

 And I will leave you with this little gem about a careless stealer of other peoples' poetry which I have been thinking about a lot this week.