Teaching Copyright -- EFF curriculum for balanced copyright education
Rebecca from EFF sez,
Teaching Copyright (Thanks, Rebecca!)
You may have seen the new anti-copying educational program the Copyright Alliance is promoting to the nation's teachers. Today, EFF launched its own "Teaching Copyright" curriculum and website to help educators give students the real story about their digital rights and responsibilities on the Internet and beyond.The Copyright Alliance -- backed by the recording, broadcast, and software industries -- has given its curriculum the ominous title "Think First, Copy Later." But EFF's curriculum (the result of more than a year of work) introduces critical questions of digital citizenship into the classroom without misinformation that scares kids from expressing themselves in the modern world.
There are a lot of good resources on TeachingCopyright.org -- everything from lesson plans for high school students to guides to copyright law, including fair use and the public domain. So it's worth checking out whether you are a teacher, a student, or a parent.
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Those kids have holes in their skulls.
those are for the RIAA electrodes.
Cory,
Wasn't this originally a final project in your COMM499 class at USC?
Had a look at the curriculum, understandably this focuses mainly on US copyright law. are there any Australians (or other countries for that manner) that this has been adapted for?
are there plans for it to be?
I realise much is probably relevant due to the Australian Free Trade Agreement with the USA, but I'm no lawyer.
Also, I can't see how this curriculum is licenced! :)
it's got a CC symbol at the bottom, but it doesn't say what licence.
is it public domain?
I thought by default a work is under copyright unless signified otherwise.
Very nice lesson plans. The activities like the mock trial sound like a fun challenge for the students. I see many good discussion questions in there designed to get students talking and debating the points.
I wasn't able to access the handouts. I like how everything is laid out in the teachers guide but without a student sheet to go with it, I think it could get too chaotic trying to tell everyone what to do. The instructions need to be crystal clear (market tested always good) and rich with graphic content. Slides, placards, video clips.
It's wonderful to see an organization put together lesson plans like this and offer them for free online. High school classrooms are a great place to discuss legal debates like these.
The material may be a little one-sided, but you can discuss the bias, too. At least you are trying to get the students to think about the issue.
@#1 iwood "Those kids have holes in their skulls.":
No, their monochromatic insect eyes just happen to be the same color as the wallpaper. :)
Great lesson plan and visuals - and props to #5Wolfiesma for (what looks like) the teacher's perspective.
Speaking as a public librarian: turn the 2 FAQs into one page each, so I can print them out as a 2-sided one sheet. The public library is where a lot of fair use is committed, I mean exercised.
As a music professional (composer, producer, musician) I have some brief comments about the curriculum. I find it to be generally well-developed, but a couple of things merit attention:
http://www.teachingcopyright.org/about
"...when we surveyed existing digital education resources related to copyright, we were dismayed to find that much of the available material relied on inaccurate generalizations about technology and law."
This is an excellent observation, but they are also guilty of the same thing in places. For example:
http://www.teachingcopyright.org/handout/copyright-faq
"Anyone to whom the author/creator has given or assigned his or her copyright (e.g., an employer if the copyrighted work is created under a "work made for hire" agreement, a publisher or record company if the copyrighted work is given in exchange for a publishing or recording contract). Usually this means that the author/creator has given up his or her own copyright in the work."
The author-publisher-record company relationship they describe is a generalization and is usually not the case. A publishing contract rarely results in the author giving up all or even most of his/her rights and interest in the work. A recording contract does not usually cover composing and publishing rights. They fail to make the distinction between a Composition and a Sound Recording, an extremely important point for anyone trying to understand this. By lumping it all together in the above paragraph, they are causing more confusion and misleading the students. The last sentence is completely false -- what do they base "usually" on?
http://www.teachingcopyright.org/curriculum/hs/3
"Meanwhile, others are using copyrighted content to build a culture of remixes and mashups — essentially multimedia collages — exercising a great deal of wit and creativity in the process."
Since when are "wit and creativity" sufficiently measurable to be used in making a legal determination? I submit that this is so subjective as to be useless, and it frankly looks like they are making a rash generalization to justify instances of potential infringement. I suggest that a more rigorous approach to their writing would give the lessons more of an authoritative weight.
I would like to think these are honest mistakes, but it reads like they are trying to portray publishers and record companies as the main copyright holders (as opposed to us individual folks) and therefore make victims of copyright infringement less sympathetic.
Whatever the motive, I urge them make these corrections. I think the EFF usually does outstanding work and would love to see this curriculum be fair and balanced. As is, it falls short.
#4: It's quite clear how the licensing works. The CC logo on the footer of every page of the teachingcopyright.org website links to http://www.eff.org/copyright and according to http://www.eff.org/copyright
"Any and all original material on the EFF website may be freely distributed at will under the Creative Commons Attribution License, unless otherwise noted."
This text links to CC-by 3.0 US.
The EFF knew what they were linking to when they made the teachingcopyright.org website. Clearly they had intended to license everything on their auxiliary websites under a single license (this approach allows for mass relicensing later by changing one page on one website—minimal maintenance). Therefore I feel confident using teachingcopyright.org material in accordance with CC-by 3.0 US.
For the most part the site was informative and I'd be happy to recommend it to others. The Copy Quiz is too quick to jump to a true or false answer in the following question.
For all we know Dwight's favorite band licenses CDs to share and Dwight's behavior is totally in compliance with this license. We don't have enough information about the license on what Dwight shared to say that Dwight did or didn't commit copyright infringement. Instead of saying as much and concluding false, I'd prefer an answer that says we need more information or details precisely what information we need to better respond true/false.