Copyright for Educators

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(Via Moving at the Speed of Creativity.)

1 year and 8 months ago I made a video containing short clips of my son’s first four months. I also added in 5 minutes of Lynryd Skynrd’s song “Simple Man” as a background track. I shared the video with family members and on a whim decided to add it to Youtube along with clips of my son’s first Halloween and first words. This is where I messed up. It is a mistake many make, and probably do not realize they are making.

I foolishly thought my little video would be seen only by my own family and the friends they shared the video with. I knew the risks. I knew online videos are open to everyone unless the user makes their videos private. But I decided to fight the law and see what would happen. (In reality, I was just naive, and did not feel there was a threat to my video).

Even after I started learning more about content online and copyright issues, I did not take the video down because I was curious to see if it would be noticed.

Almost two years later my video has performed as I predicted…

With 300+ views I can tell you that 90% were from my own mother showing the video to her friends. Regardless, this does not excuse my usage of protected works.

Today I received notification from Youtube that this video had been found to contain music belonging to Universal Music Group. Or at least, I assume “UMG” stands for Universal.

Here is a screenshot of the email that was sent to me…

As you can see my punishment is weak. Their claim allows them to include advertisements on my video page. At first I was relieved my little video could still stay up. This seemed very fair, until I visited my page and saw this…

I have since removed the video and hope to hear from others. Has this happened to you?

How can we as educators share an experience such as this with our students as they venture out and create digital projects?

The Library of Congress has recently launched a photo pilot program on Flickr where they are posting over 3000 high quality images from their most popular collections. Not only are these images available on Flickr, they are also available there with no copyright restrictions. According to the Library of Congress article they hope to address some challenges that they face…

If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

Below I have included a couple of my favorite images from the collection. Enjoy and explore for yourself!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179130295/in/set-72157603671370361

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179130295/in/set-72157603671370361

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179195370/

Needless to say this one caught my eye in the “News in the 1910s set“

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162723195/in/set-72157603624867509/

Here is the promo video from Oct. 2006

I really enjoy viewing, editing, and scrolling through the calendar in flash. I had it running on my laptop, offline, as I was adding events for the first week back. When I got home I logged in via wireless and it automatically sync’d all my work from the day. Simply awesome! I look forward to when we start seeing this functionality in more web services.

Note of frustration. Today I went to download my “beginning of the year” files from Google Docs and the web blocker popped up. I knew I had the files backed up at Yahoo Briefcase, only to find that blocked as well. Last but not least, I found my thumb drive with my last back up. In between the decorating, labeling, and crayon sorting, I was hoping to use Google Docs to put together a collection of creative commons flickr images that I plan on using for a bulletin board near my classroom library. Luckily Zoho Writer worked for creating a web based document containing the photos. Flickr Storm + Zoho Writer + Color Printer = Success. Now I have some nice scenic, global pictures to hang on my connections board!

Related links…(I think I will keep doing this related link sharing!)

Creative Commons Video- Wanna Work Together
Creative Commons Comic Book- Check out the Flash Animation Version!
Yahoo Creative Commons Search
Flickr Postcard Viewer
Zoho

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• Question for everyone–pass the word, please comment!

Does anyone know of a place where I can host SWF files? I have a screencast I made, using Jing Project, for the Yahoo Gobbler. I have it hosted at Screencast.com on one of their free accounts, which has limited bandwidth. I am afraid that once 20 people watch it I will no longer have access to it for the month. I have already used up a quarter of the bandwidth showing it to my colleagues.

Thank you!