Remix and remake
As an educator the Internet is my hero, if I don’t have time to produce the materials myself, a quick scout around using Google will find something useable. I am also more than happy to share any of my material and people can use it as they please. After all there is no reason to reinvent the wheel - we can just alter it a little. Fair use should support me on this - correct? I am afterall an educator and using this for educational purposes, surely this fits clearly under the fair use policy. Tolisano however states that “..educators are wading through uncharted waters…” and we need to think before we use.The first problem, as always, is that these laws are specific to the country you are operating in and that makes the waters even more murky. If I were still working in the United Kingdom I could potentially remix materials under the “fair dealing” heading, similar to the “fair use” in the US. However, this is not an understanding that is Europe wide. I am therefore bound by the Berne Agreement .I try to teach and model good copyright behaviour, using images that have been labelled for reuse and ensuring that I also credit my sources and content. However, I am not perfect I recently overhauled the help material I have produced for pupils and realised that the images I had used for my Photoshop help videos were not labelled for re-use. Should I leave them on my Youtube Channel? Will crediting the author be enough? Should I re-do them and discuss my actions with my pupils? I have chosen the latter and I think it will be a great copyright discussion starter for my pupils (also they did need some overhauling!). Whether I agree with the current copyright laws or not, these are laws that the pupils will be operating under and they are worth knowing and discussing, whether one intends to abide by them or rebel against them as it is always worth knowing your enemy.My film group also had a copyright issue. They made a film about the school to share with a group we were working with in Moldova and chose to share over Facebook. They added music to the whole piece and uploaded it to Facebook. We were sent an email (after a very short amount of time) informing us that our movie had been removed and that our account would be suspended if we posted materials that broke copyright law again. I had never really considered Copyright before this, as I worked within my “fair use” bubble and the projects I had done in the past were kept within the school environment. I am excited about sharing material via social media, however these events have made me think about my own practices, and how I should model and teach copyright to my pupils.The term “original” bothers me within the copyright debate . What is an original piece? Disney is a great example of that discussion. They benefit greatly for the current copyright laws however surely they are excellent remixers, in his Ted Talk, Larry Lessing states that ...
“All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them”
Therefore what is the “original” idea protected by copyright laws and what is simple remixing. In a society where students have constant access to media do we need to determine what is an original idea and what is “remixed”? Or should we really be discussing ethics. I think the new challenge as educators will not be to educate about copyright but to educate about how to ethically remix, i.e use other peoples ideas as inspiration but give those that inspired you the credit that they are due. Lessing states that...
“the ecology of sharing needs freedom within to create. Freedom which means without the permission of anyone”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4[/youtube]I do hope that we have some of that freedom as it is from this base that some of the most exciting ideas, designs and concepts have been developed!