Degrees of copyright

Since I've been publishing on the web for a long time (and been burned for it more than once), I've spent a fair amount of time investigating First Amendment-type issues. What's become clear to me is that most internet users don't understand intellectual property very well and often misapply what they do know.

Here at the journalism school, we are all required to take a course on the First Amendment, but I worry that the class doesn't focus enough on applying what we know. I've seen journalism students lift images from other sites without even thinking about whether or not their actions would be considered fair use. They think since they're journalists and they're being informative, it shouldn't be a problem. And besides, it's the internet, right? It's not the same here, right?

Hardly.

So here's my proposal. Before our students start publishing anything on their blogs, they'll have to carefully consider what kind of copyright they want to put on their own work. Take a look at Creative Commons, a site that helps writers/creators of all kinds come up with a simple copyright license. If they're happy to see their work be copied elsewhere with or without attribution (i.e., "some rights reserved" vs. "all rights reserved") without putting it completely in the public domain, Creative Commons can help them label their work as shareable. Also, their info page has some great information on copyright. Check out the "Get Creative" video on that page.

The whole idea behind Creative Commons is collaboration — that if copyright barriers are removed, we can do really cool stuff with each other's work. And I think that's an approach that can suit an educational setting quite well. Do we want to require attribution? Do we want to require those who reuse our work to share all their work in the same way? Do we want to let them change our work or republish it verbatim? Creative Commons lets you mark your work with all of these preferences.

If we get students thinking about copyrights on their own work, I think they're a lot more likely to consider the copyrights of others. I certainly was.