Week 4: School Libraries & Information Seeking / Copyright

This week's readings and websites were a bit varied in their approaches to the copyright law. To begin, I was first and foremost intrigued by The Fischbowl Blog that dealt with copyright. With a page title called Living Life Against the Law, how could anyone turn a blind eye? According to Jessica Litman, whom is quoted throughout the passage:

"...the U.S. copyright law is even more technical, inconsistent and difficult to understand; more importantly, it touches everyone and everything." (the whole article can be found here)

Understanding that the Copyright Laws and Statures are a 142 page document immediately gives me a headache. Perhaps the only way to gain any understanding from the law is the ease into it, one step at a time. There are many components of copyright that people frankly just do not understand, dare I say all of it? Realistically though chances are that everyone almost all of the time, if working with some sort of creative media (especially in a classroom setting) is dancing a fine line between adhering to the law and breaking it. A perfect example is my last blog. I know that the images I used are protected by someone, somewhere, and that I did not necessarily site them. Was I lazy or ignorant in not citing them? Perhaps a little bit, but first and foremost, I am treating this blog as a conversation, and both of the items I used images for, the filter bubble and 'Bubble Boy,' became part of the conversation.

Would the United States government be upset about that? Yea, probably. If I really wanted to, I could have drawn my own images based off of my thoughts on the subject. What would that do though? Could my drawings be misconstrued as breaking a copyright law because they kind of look like something else that another artist has done? Like I said...a headache approaching means that it is time to ease into it.

Within to the Simpson text, the entirety of an ironically short chapter 3 deals with Licensed and Royalty-Free Materials. It is safe to say that most "copyright-free" items in public domain are hard to implement into everyday life. "Royalty-free" items, which are in fact governed be a license, are probably a bit more usable because they may actually be less antiquated pieces that are still relevant in our current society. Ever since I have came into the LIS program last semester almost all of my professor's have painstakingly made sure to cite the source of their images, if not the actual author the website to which it was found. Be it that we are all dealing with information professionalism then it is, more or less, expected that our teachers understand the law more than we do. Simpson's text somewhat qualifies that citations may not necessarily be enough. Yet, his introduction to the topic is fairly useful.

The CPSD Bound by The Law comic book, provided by Duke University, was very useful and interesting when it came to discussing "Fair Use" under the copyright laws and also what was considered "public domain." The following two picture/charts seemed very helpful:

(Both Images Retrieved from Bound By the Law: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/index)

I believe that it is safe to say we as educators and future educators should focus our curricula on attacking what it copyright safe or figuring out the correct ways to cite media in our classrooms. This goes beyond the students, also taking into account other teachers, professors, and administrators. I suppose we would all rather be safe than sorry, but I believe that the best way to actually attack this is NOT head on, yet by EASING INTO IT.

(and now my headache has subsided)