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Copyright Exposed: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright

What it is: Copyright can be tricky for students (and adults) to understand.  Copyright Exposed: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright does a good job of just that, taking the mystery out of copyright.  Here your students will watch a short video/comic that explains copyright.  Next, students can explore how copyright came to be by looking at the milestone files on record.  Reading the Fine Print helps students answer questions such as: “Do I have to register a copyright to secure protection?”; “If it’s on the Internet can I use it?”; and “Is it okay to use up to 5% of someone else’s work?”.  Finally, students can learn what steps they need to take to secure a copyright for their work.

How to integrate Copyright Exposed: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright into your curriculum: Copyright law is important to teach our students of all ages.  As soon as we ask students to create original work, we should be teaching them about copyright.  I always found copyright difficult to teach, students had a hard time understanding what was fair use and when they were violating copyright.  It didn’t help that many of the adults in their lives weren’t model good copyright habits.  When students create their own original work, and you can walk them through the copyright process, it starts to resonate with them more.  Students may think nothing of “borrowing” something off of the Internet for their own use without permission but when they think about someone else claiming the work they created, they start to feel differently about it.  Copyright Exposed is an excellent presentation/site to go through as a class.  It helps answer those “sticky” situations of fair use, owning a copyright, and using content from the Internet.  The site is written in easy-to-understand language so students will have no trouble following along.  Students can navigate this site independently, but I prefer using it with a projector where the whole class can work through copyright together and discuss what they are learning with others.

Tips: I wrote about Cyberbee in 2008, it is another great site for teaching about Copyright!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Copyright Exposed: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright in your classroom!

Founder of Anastasis Academy, The Learning Genome Project, 5Sigma Education Conference, tech integration specialist, instructional coach, writer, dreamer.

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59 Comments

  1. I think this is a great idea to teach students and adults more about copyright and how bad it really could be.People now really don’t know the concequences of copyrighting so maybe in the future they won’t get sued in the long run.

  2. Its a good thing to tell student about copyright because that how they could take ownership in there own work and get credited.

  3. I think that this is a very good website for students and adults to learn about what copyright is and the consequences there are for plagiarizing, because there are other people who don’t know what copyrighting is.

  4. I think this website is really good it teaches us about copyright it give us good information.And also it will help other people in school more people might attend into this great website.

  5. I don’t understand how it is so hard to write your own work. 45 minutes of some decent work is usually of a better quality than the text copied from Wikipedia. By copying and pasting, no one will learn a thing, which is almost always the purpose of their assignment in the first place. Not to mention they are taking the risk of being charged with plagiarism. Even though it would be nice to be able to blow off projects and such, wouldn’t a hard earned grade be worth more than one earned by someone else? I guess hard work just isn’t for everyone.

  6. Its a good thing to tell student about copyright they could take responsibility in there own work and really do the work and learn something and not cheating it by copyright writing

  7. I find this blog very helpful in the sense that it simplifies the difficult concepts of Copyright infringement and the consequences that come with this serious issue. Not only does this blog break the key parts down, but also serves as a tool for younger kids who can be introduced earlier to the problem. Copyright is overlooked, but it in fact is a serious problem that affects us today. Not only does this website reiterate the issues but the blog breaks key parts down , not compromising the issue, but making it much easier to interpret.

  8. Copyrighting is wrong and not many of of are aware of that. Someone needs to spread the information and get the information through. Us copyrighting doesn’t give the credit to the original makers of the work. This information will help us in the future and the upcoming generations.

  9. I think it’s important to teach students what copyright is. They should know how it can affect their life. This will make sure that they will not use copyrighted work as their own.

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