Protecting Intellectual Property
Posted by Eric C. on May 15, 2007 in Blogging, Internet Research, Libraries
Increasingly, students are becoming not just consumers of content but creators as well. This poses interesting challenges for teachers and librarians as we try to navigate the waters of intellectual property rights. What can students and teachers fairly use without permission and how can we protect what we create? Although not always clear, we were in somewhat familiar territory with fair use rules and content in the public domain. This became considerably more murky with the introduction of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now with an explosion of content on the web and the growing struggle over whether knowledge should be free or constrained for commercial use, it seems almost impossible to keep track of what is ok to use and what is not. For many the traditional bounds of copyright law did not fully address these issues. To help with this problem Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons which developed a new class of licensing. Creative Commons licensing is very clear in how content can be used consequently its use for digital content has exploded. Given these new forms of licensing, it is even more important that we understand the use rights for any piece of intellectual property we run across on the web and the implications for our students and teachers when they want to use them.
Fair Use
- Stanford University Library site on fair use – very comprehensive
- Fair use chart for educators (alternative print version)
- More than the average user would ever want to know about fair use
Creative Commons
- Rewriting laws of copyright
- Great overview of Creative Commons for educators
- Creative commons home page
- Learn more about CC
Creative Commons Licensed Content
July 24th, 2007 at 9:50 am
thank you for listingthe fair use for educators chart link. it’s great.