Copyright and Creative Commons

This Tuesday we had a guest lecture by Jason Hardin. Jason is the manager of access services in the library, his job is to control what works are being taken in and out of the library. On Tuesday he discussed with our class copyright. I had been exposed to copyright in the past because it is what my father does. My dad is an intellectual property lawyer. So, for my whole life I have been taught never to steal music because it is unfair to the artist. However, what I didn't know was that schools must provide their students with an alternative to illegal downloads. Schools must do this because of the Higher Education Opportunity Act. With the HEOA there are three main things a school must do: 1.They must make an annual disclosure to students regarding copyright and campus policies, 2. They must develop a plan to combat unauthorized file-sharing, 3. They must implement an alternative to file-sharing. I had never known that schools required this. I think it is very helpful and smart because this way the universities are providing students legal ways to get music or movies. I think that the HEOA is great. However, schools need to make sure that they follow through with these three requirements so that students can benefit from learning of other ways of file-sharing that is legal. I also learned that if I wanted to copyright my own work I can by using creative commons. For this blog entry I plan on copyrighting my work!


Copyright and Creative Commons by Sophie Laster-Hazzard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.