João Mattar
Universidade Anhembi Morumbi
São Paulo - Brasil
Department of Games Design
Learner Description: This activity was prepared for educators, students and institutions involved in Distance Education to understand some basics about intellectual property and copyright.
Disclaimer: This activity, and information on these pages, have only educational purposes and are NOT a legal advice.
The Fuzzy World of Copyright
The widespread use of the Internet and the intense progress of Distance Education have both brought many doubts to the already messy universe, which gets labyrinthine when it comes to educational uses. Teachers, students, designers, institutions, companies that produce multimedia educational content etc. feel lost and bombarded by many times different orientations on such complex issues.
Take into consideration the curriculum of the course Teaching Copyright Law, proposed by the Recording Industry Association of America and right after by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with totally different views on what should be the ‘same’ subject.
Many times, we feel pressed to choose between a more traditional position, that might suggest that we support the ‘oppressive’ laws of copyright, or a more freedom-like position of rebelling against that oppression.
However, we must understand the laws in order to protect ourselves, our students, our own material and even the institutions we work for.
The first thing to understand is that trade secrets, trademarks, patents and copyright are all sub-topics of a much broader topic, named intellectual property. That is to say, copyright is not alone in protecting intellectual property, and a great part of our confusion comes from the fact that we do not understand the differences in this large picture.
There are certainly many interesting experiences going with new suggestions for copyright, and Creative Commons is certainly the most widely used nowadays. You should understand its basic concepts and licenses.
