Thing 10: Copyright, Copywrong and Creative Commons
Please excuse the brevity (and funny punctuation) of the next few blog posts. Being in Europe has its drawbacks: expensive internet cafes and funny keyboards.
Teachers have always gotten around traditional copyright law, whether they knew it or not, by the “Fair Use” standards in place for education. While this serves us well, it will not always serve our students. Nor does traditional copyright laws take into account the instantaneous nature of sharing and remixing information.
Enter Creative Commons.
CC licensing is necessary in today”s world. It can, I think, be thought of as a community. I”ll use your images, music, etc. and you can use mine. There is nobody policing anything. It”s up to the individual users to ensure that they are abiding by the terms of the license that has been placed on the work by the creator.
I kind of like that idea when it comes to students: empowering people to ensure that they are using other people”s work responsibly.
Related posts:
This is why I don’t like copyright: It really limits people in their freedom to use things they bought / downloaded.
I mean it is correct that artists’ work should be protected, but copyright is just a little overdone.
I like approaches to that like fsf.org, with their GNU/Linux operating system they made an OS that you can share, explore and modify.
Nowadays copyright is only used by big companies like Microsoft and Adobe to ensure that they will stay big companies.
So for example on http://lkcl.net/rtmp/ the website of rtmpdump, the author expresses his anger to adobe multiple times because adobe claimed copyright for the rtmp protocol.
On the other hand i read websites that try to enforce copyright, because there were cases where people linked to an image on the web on their website, and the website that image was hosted on went down due to traffic load. But, for that I think that when you put an image on your website you have to consider that the internet is free and that by making it publicly available anyone can download it.
On some websites people even used javascript to block right clicks so that people won’t just right-click and select ‘save as’ (Which can be circumvented by looking at the source code of the website).
Anyways, I think that soon free licenses such as CC will gain more acceptance thru websites such as flicr and sourceforge
Flicr -> CC images
Jamendo.com -> CC music
Sourceforge.net -> open source programs
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