YouTube, Copyright and Lucacept

Are you developing lessons on Acceptable Use Practices, copyright issues, or Creative Commons? Then you may be interested in my discussion of this topic, as well as a wonderful blog posting by Jenny Luca at lucacept with her questions about the trends in copyright, education, students, the internet and teachers, YouTube and Copyright: the dilemma for educators.

Jenny ends her posting with these thoughtful questions.

I’m wondering about the future of copyright and what may happen now that user generated content is really taking off. Will we see a backlash against copyright regulations? Will we see users post their content and stipulate that it can be used and reformatted so that educators can employ it in classrooms to convey important messages? Will more people use creative commons licences to allow their work to be used easily in educational settings? Will the copyright council be able to stem the flow of infringements to the law as more and more educators realise the potential benefits of YouTube to provide useful content for classroom instruction?

This is my response, and I am responsible for my opinions and statements on this topic. Thanks go to those who prompted me to think of these topics, but they are in no way responsible for any of my opinions or statements here.

Your insightful lessons using YouTube must encourage students to upload their work [there], and this is a wonderful extension of this popular media venue into their educational life.

Thanks for the tip on downloading before the lesson. That would help prevent ruined lessons from technical malfunctions.

Hopefully, Creative Commons Copyright will become more prevalent. I use the Share-alike Copyright, in my work, and I encourage others to consider it. Even though some dispute it, teachers have permission to use work under American copyright for educational purposes.

I follow Lawrence Lessig's lessons and stories(Free Culture) on what happened when business became more important that expression.

I am all for making money, yet I agree with those who believe that family or corporate empires don't need to be maintained from one person's or group's work. For example, our new copyright laws directly favored Sonny Bono's widow (who replaced him in the US Congress, after his untimely death while on a SKI TRIP).

I am not sure why the work of Sonny Bono is more important than the work of John Phillip Sousa, but hey you never know.

Lawrence Lessig,[Stanford law professor] gives an excellent Ted speech about John Phillip Sousa's active disagreement with long copyrights. Sousa believed that we would have a more creative, richer world if people were allowed to have access to copyrighted work after a much shorter time than we have now. I agree.

Thanks for discussing this important topic.