Creative Commons Lab

Human beings are creating new things everyday.  Innovation is one of the things that drives our society, and humanity should encourage the expression of new works.  Copyright is important because new designs, products, and original ideas should have some sort of protection.  It was originally designed to help creativity blossom in society and protect products created by the human mind.  Copyright covers some very basic rights of the creator.  These rights include being compensated for original work.  The creator should be able to control the work and how it is used, reproduced, distributed, performed, or displayed.  If the creator chooses to sell the work, then it is his or her choice.

Fair use is a sort of exception to copyright.  It is used in education for granting use to copyrighted materials. Educators can use materials to supplement other information, such as textbooks, under fair use.  Fair use protects educators by allowing them to use copyrighted material; however, there are limits to fair use.  Educators cannot claim fair use when copyrighted material is used in place of textbooks, workbooks, etc.  It seems that if the use is limited to parts of work, and non-profit, then fair use is in effect.

In order to deal with copyright issues, there are many things that can be done.  First and foremost, information needs to be distributed to teachers to show them what is legal under fair use and what falls into copyright infringement.  Copyright benefits the creators of original works, so teachers should also be aware of using copyright to help students or themselves with works that they have created.  I found it interesting that one suggestion for dealing with copyright issues was to conduct audits of photocopying.  It's a great idea, but it seems like most schools wouldn't take the time to complete this.  I liked the suggestion of maintaining the school budget to make sure that needed materials were purchased legally.  Unfortunately, most educators know that schools are not always fiscally responsible.  Then, of course, there was the suggestion of modeling legal and ethical behavior in the school.  I try to do so, and I think the most educators do as well.

This lab was very informative to me.  I knew a little bit about copyright laws, but I always thought education was totally immune to them!  Now I realize that fair use enables educators to use some portions of original work, but not all of them.  I thought the videos about copyright would be very beneficial to show in classrooms.  I liked some of the suggestions for helping to regulate copyright material in schools, but unfortunately, with the economy the way it is and the way schools are cutting back, I don't see anyone's sole job as watching what teachers bring into their classrooms.

Below I have a photo that would be very pertinent to my class because we are studying hypertonic, hypotonic, and isotonic solutions, so I could use this in a presentation or on my class website in order to show students what they should be looking for under a microscope.

Red Onion Cells in  Salt Solution

Photo Attribution:

Original Image:  "Red Onion Cells in a salt solution"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tessawatson/6106595838/
By: tjmwatson

Released under an Attribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/







 

Poas Volcano

Photo Attribution:

Original Image:  "Poas Volcano"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68975111@N07/6271634829/
By: jheintz20  (me!)

Released under an Attribution-Noncommerical-Share-Alike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/