Following up the copyright discussion

Before I started the path to become an instructional designer, I never worried too much about copyright. If you are teaching in a classroom, you can excuse most anything as “fair use” because the odds are that no one is going to catch you. On the other hand, once one starts delving into the world of digital media for instructional use, there is no excuse not to be at least rudimentarily familiar with the essential elements of copyright law as it pertains to education.

That being said, there is a LOT to understand about copyright, and generally speaking, it is not just about memorizing the rules and following them. There is a little bit of analysis involved, as the four factors for fair use (nice alliteration) demonstrates. Of course, if this was your first time discussion copyright, it might have been very confusing, but in future conversations, you will continue to build on your understanding.

I get a new perspective every time the topic is discussed, and after I left class, I was thinking about some of the issues that came up. Nathan- your WWJBD theme–isn’t that parody? Angela-I thought about the landscaping architecture issue and I suddenly saw your perspective too—you paid for the plans, why can’t you use them as you wish. When your friend ordered them, she must have signed off on that and it didn’t seem important til you had the plans in hand and realized that you had to use that company. I did say that we all have a choice, and we do to some extent. At the same time, as we saw with your student handbook, sometimes our choices with our intellectual property are bound up with complicated choices, and often the limitations of our choices as it relates to our intellectual property is also limited by our power within the situation.

It is sobering to think that an institution, teacher, and students could all be liable when it comes to a copyright offense. At the same time, you are more empowered to make decisions if you know all the parameters involved and can reason out your choices. It made me glad that I hadn’t required you to post your appropriated images on your site after that discussion, but I don’t think you would run into trouble for this assignment either.

 As an FYI, the code to reference an image on another site is this:

<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/39151655@N00/191427110/“>
<img src=”http://static.flickr.com/52/191427110_a7a3683b93_m.jpg” width=”221″ height=”240″ alt=”snaggle!” /></a>

The first line creates a hyperlink to the original posting <a href…
The second line embed the image in your blog <img src…
To do this in your wordpress blog, you have to go to the html view (look at the menu above where you are typing and click the “html” button). If I do that and paste that text here, this is what happens:

When you’re doing this with your own photos, no problem whatsoever. If you do this with creative commons licensed-photos, give attribution. If you are doing this with copyrighted other photos, you are in a big amorphous gray area.

I hope the introduction of the creative commons movement is helpful and that everyone has a chance to review the visual explanation of what it is and how it works.