My thinking about community and privacy in the previous post seems separate from my thoughts on copyright. I think we are moving in the right direction here, but we need more clear direction (maybe some professional development? Not exciting, but maybe necessary.). As I said today, I think we are fine on the software, and getting better on the music. But in terms of images from the web and paper copies from books I think we have a long way to go.
I also think we need to do some more collective thinking about the difference between copyright and attribution. We need to respect ownership. That means following the copyright laws, but it also means citing our sources. And as teachers, we need to model this. I am much better at it than I was a few years ago, but I still need to push myself. And I need to think about the citation requirements for embeded YouTube videos. Since the url makes it clear that it is youtube, that is a start, but should we put a citation of some kind (credit to the person who uploaded it?) in a caption? Maybe we should have a school standard for that. Of course students have to include the youtube citation in their bibliography, but what about my demonstration in class? Probably there should be a citation. On this blog? Yes. Maybe I need to go back and edit the post with the Connections video? I will do that tomorrow.
I like Matt’s point of using more images with the creative commons license. I need to see what is really possible in terms of historical images. Maybe I should do some scanning of images from 19th century books — they are all out of copyright, and I could license the scans with the creative commons license.
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Hi Heather … I found your writing interesting as well as your verbal contributions to the discussion yesterday … about two year ago at Chapin, we hired a lawyer John Palfrey to help us under the big picture issues regarding attribution
“That means following the copyright laws, but it also means citing our sources. And as teachers, we need to model this.”
If you go to http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/ you can read about him and the Berkman Center at Harvard that he runs
But MORE IMPORTANTLY … I have posted his LEGAL ADVICE to us regarding attribution on the Web page of
http://www.summercore.com/wittenbergdoor/JPnotes.html
He made it clear to use that it was OKAY to allow our students to create Powerpoint and Web pages with graphics from other sites … Steve
As a copyright lawyer and Facebook/Flicker/blog addict, I’ve been keeping my eye on this from a few different angles. In some ways it is more relevant than ever given the access we all have to copyrighted work and the ease of copying/distribution. Technically, when I posted Maddy’s iMovie on my FB page, I was infringing her copyright (I think she will let this go!) Whether her iMovie was also infringing as a result of the music/images it contained has to do with whether it falls under the fair use exception. As this example illustrates, in my opinion copyright law as it exists now is completely unequipped to deal with these issues presented by the internet. And this doesn’t even begin to address the jurisdictional issues.
One quick clarification — attribution is completely unrelated to copyright. Attribution speaks more to plagiarism, research standards, ethics, etc. but doesn’t have anything to do with copyright. If anything, if you infringe someone’s copyright with attribution it tends to show it was an intentional infringement because you knew you were copying someone else’s work.
Student/teacher use of third party materials would be a “fair use” of copyrighted works assuming they met the criteria for that safe harbor. I agree with Palfrey’s comment above that the most important of these is “did your use take potential money out of the copyright holder’s pocket?” I’d be happy to brainstorm with you about this more if you are ever interested. Elizabeth