Thing #8 - Copyright and Creative Commons

My ten question quiz turned out to be a 12 question quiz. It seems that most of us have been a little brainwashed and intimidated by what we have heard to be the copyright law without understanding Fair Use. It is interesting to compare the broad, legal discussion of fair use and its implications and then to go to the industry-sponsored web site and view their self proclaimed limitations ("Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines"). It is comforting to know that we are not breaking the law in doing our best to educate our students. We have a lot of internal resources that are available only to our students and are fairly well protected in what we do. All of the people I talked to were aware enough to be cautious when generating material for general public consumption, but again, everybody thought that most of those limitations remained in the educational arena.

No one that I talked to knew about the Creative Commons process - most aren't really worried about copyright protection. However, as we generate more and more resources in-house, perhaps we need to pay attention to this...

Creative Commons License: