Please Copy It Right: Learning Why Copyright Matters

      In a world where social media is huge and young people are trying to create and ‘ascetic’ look for their profiles, we often take someone else’s photo from Tumbler and use it as our cover photos (I am 100% guilty of doing this). The question is, is this infringing the terms of copyright?

Artsvector. (October 2015) Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2cqKzPc

Copyright means that all rights are reserved to the individual who produced the piece and uploaded it to the Internet. Therefore, it is prohibited to copy, distribute, display or adapt the work. Since copyright makes it extremely difficult to share work or for teachers to use work as educational resources Canada has crafted up Fair Dealing. Fair dealing allows teachers or any educational staff that is a part of a non-profit educational institution to copy or reproduce short excerpts of copyrighted protected work. Unfortunately, a “short excerpt” is only 10% of a piece of work, this equals to a couple of an article of newspaper, one chapter of a book, or a single piece of artwork. This can be very limiting to a teacher who wants to share a full piece of work with their students. This is where Creative Commons comes in to save the day for us teachers. This innovation allows authors to share their work openly to others. This is done in 4 different ways:

• 1Attribution: allowing others to copy, distribute, display and perform copyrighted work.
• Share Alike: allowing other to distribute copyrighted work, only under a license identical to the one that governs the creator’s work.
•  Non-Commercial: allowing others to distribute, display and perform work for non-commercial purposes only.
• Non-Derivative Work: allowing others to copy, distribute, display and perform only exact copies of the created work. 

It is extremely important for teachers to know the importance of copyright in this digital age. I know that a lot of this information is new to myself and is something that I will need to continue to look into this topic. It is also something important to teach students about what copyright is and how/ when are we infringing copyright, to make them positive digital citizens.

(Tuncay). July 24, 2014 Childish Joy. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2cqhaBA