As teachers we want to engage our students. Often times I use mainstream media to help do that. I teach a web page design class and it would be time consuming if I required students to completely follow every copyright law. There is already so much material I need to pack into a semester long class. If I required the students to create all their own pictures and other media to put on their web site, we would never be able to accomplish half of the objectives. To balance this, I spend time explaining what the copyright laws are and if they ever create a website that is published to the web they must follow all copyright laws.
In the video Good/Bad Copyright, I completely agree with Lawrence Lessig from Creative Commons. The laws are extremely outdated and have not evolved fast enough to keep up with the new technology. He continues to bring out an important point, that many materials copyrighted from the 1950’s, no one is using them anyway and the creator is not making any money. A change in the laws would allow people to use the material and the creator would receive some compensation. I believe the Creative Commons is a great starting point to change the current legal practice of copyright.
You seem to be handling copyright law issues the same way that our professors have done at Full Sail. I'm curious to know if your students facilitate a great deal of creative commons materials. I'm also curious to know if they submit their own original works to creative commons. From my own perspective, I think it would be interesting to see how my own works might evolve or be used by others.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you’ve hit a good balance with your students. Trying to teach them how to create their media on top of web design would be a huge task and I also doubt that there would be enough time in a semester. It’s got to be difficult to get across copyright law and the concept of having permission; since it is so easy just to grab whatever media they may see. I have also been harping on about how antiquated the laws are when you try to apply them to new media. Fortunately, it seems as though younger lawmakers are actually starting to understand and are trying to update the laws. Unfortunately, it seems to me a very long and slow process.
ReplyDeleteCreative Commons and material from the public domain would be great assets to use in your web design class. While you mention copyright issues and urge your students to observe the laws when developing media outside of class, pointing them to open-source resources will help equip them with work-arounds and solutions.
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