Share and share alike?

Here are a couple of thoughts on the issues of copyright and intellectual property. I’ve always been careful to avoid plagiarism and pirating, and somewhere along the line I became respectful of visual creations – maybe after I created some of my own. But reading Ko & Rossen nevertheless gave me considerable food for thought.

For instance, by the time I read about “fair use,” I had already uploaded an assigned article to the lesson I recently created. I had reasoned it would be all right, since the site was passworded, my student had online library access to the article anyhow, and I was simply making access to it more convenient. After reading Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Media, though, I was less sure. In the future I will instead give directions for students to access such articles themselves.

One big hurdle to creating visually attractive online courses is finding high quality images for online use. Government sources are often recommended, and other free images are also available. My favorite source is morgueFile.com (check its front page for the etymology of the term).

Protecting one’s own original works is of course another problem. Ko & Rossen are quite right to point out that such things as using streaming media or password protecting Acrobat documents is “like building a fence around your fields. It will keep most, although not all, intruders from pillaging your crops" (p. 176). There are applications available specifically for the purpose of unlocking Acrobat files. Perhaps the newest iteration of Acrobat (version 8, due to be released next month) will foil such attempts for at least a little while.