Our focus for this week was Copyrights and Copywrongs, which honestly is something I have never really gave much thought to. I can say that this week was definitely a challenge for me. I feel that all of the information that was given to me to read through and watch is still swimming frantically around in my head and I am trying to piece it all together. What is copyright, the history of copyright, am I committing copyright infringements or plagiarism, or even both? What is considered Fair Use and what falls under copyrights and which creative common license does it fall under? Is your head spinning yet, because I know mine is?
Let’s start with the obvious, what is a copyright? A copyright, as defined by the United States Copyright Office, is the protection provided by U.S. laws to authors of “original works of authorship,” including literacy, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. Pretty simple right? I have learned this week that it is not all black and white, there are some grey areas that help complicate things. In reading Copyright Basics, it helped shed some light on a few things. It outlined what can be copyrighted and things that are not copyrighted. This article also explained who can obtain a copyright, how to secure a copyright, how long a copyright protection last, among other interesting topics. Since the link is in my college course I cannot link it for your review, however, I invite you to search Copyright Basics on the internet and several articles will come up that will help you understand if you are not familiar with copyrights.
We then had to read the white papers that was produced by the Hudson Institute. The purpose of this article was to highlight the importance of possible separating the US Copyright Office away from the US Library of Congress. Although this article is lengthy, it brought up some very good points and after reading it, I could see the argument for this. The initial copyright law was signed by President George Washington, yes you read that right, George Washington, and even though time has changed dramatically since then, there has been little change to copyright laws. Our world is not the same world that it was in 1790 and let’s be honest it not the same world that it was in 1990. With the development of the internet, things have exponentially changed. So if our world is changing this fast, why not this particular law and where it is housed.
Did you know there is a fine line between copyright infringement and plagiarism? Me neither, but once I read the article written by Jonathan Bailey, it made more since. It is possible to be guilty of one and not the other, but it is also possible to be guilty of both, depending on when whatever you are doing was copyrighted. It’s crazy how this can happen.
Next up, the Fair Use Doctrine. This doctrine allows the use of copyrighted materials without permission of the copyright holder for certain purposes, but it has to be limited and for a transformative purpose (Lamar 2021). Part of our assignment this week, we were given two case scenarios and we had to be able to approach the situation from a technology administrator. We had to explain what was wrong with the situation and explain how we would fix it. These were a little rough for me, because I had to spend time looking at each book, website, or movie and reference the copyright table Lamar provided me so that I could come to the determination if what the teacher was using fell under the Fair Use Doctrine or was it copyrighted.
As stated above, this week was a challenge for me, but I feel that I learned a lot about copyright laws and even the history of copyrights. I never gave it much thought and really had not seen the importance to me or my students, but now, I see the importance and now I feel that I could correctly use media, written works or even audio works in my classroom. If you are a teacher like me, I invite you to read up of copyrights, you may find out that you are also not doing things correctly.
Reference
Admin, & *, N. (2021, February 5). The importance of copyrights, Patents and trademarks in business. PTes College. Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://ptes.edu.in/the-importance-of-copyrights-patents-and-trademarks-in-business/.
Bailey, J. (2013, October 7). The difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism. Plagiarism Today. Retrieved December 4, 2021, from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2013/10/07/difference-copyright-infringement-plagiarism/.
Lamar University, (2021, November 29). Week 1 Lecture_Text [Document]. Blackboard.
My Journey with Digital Learning and Leading 