Thing 7: Creative Comons

I spent some time cruising through pictures and music on Creative Commons and find it interesting. I am a private person and still can’t quite imagine just ‘posting’ all of my pictures on a venue for the world to see. Which in turn is perhaps why I don’t find it terribly interesting to look through other folks images. Learning about copyright law was very worthwhile as our world becomes ever more connected through the internet.

If I were to share my own images, I would in all likely hood license them as:

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

My reasoning for this comes from a personal experience. In the summer of 2008 my husband received a phone call from a friend in New York City saying they saw his picture on the side of a bus as an advertisement for the upcoming marathon. We thought they must have been mistaken since we knew nothing of it. After doing some searches and receiving more calls, we determined that it was indeed him! Though it was exciting to know that his picture was plastered all over New York, he felt awkward and invaded. He had run the 2005 and 2006 marathons and the picture, slightly manipulated, was from the 2006 race. We believe the photographer who took his picture, sold it to the advertisers promoting the race. In the end, he did get some fun swag from the marathon committee after we contacted them and it was exciting to walk around the city seeing pictures of him everywhere! Yet, the whole experience left us feeling as if there was no privacy.

As for student use, I whole-heartedly agree with All I Ever Needed to Know (I learned in Kindergarten): I do not believe we should get into a habit of promoting all students to copyright all their work all the time. While I believe some students may have ideas, products, creations that are truly innovative, most of what is produced is part of the "learning process" and wouldn't seem to me to rise to a level that requires additional protection. It also may promote a false sense of import to the creator that is unwarranted. I believe our culture promotes too great a sense of self-aggrandizement and copyrighting everything would accentuate that trend, which I believe contributes to degrading our sense of community. I would rather the focus be a more equal balance between individual and cooperative group sharing.

*the images for creative commons licensing would not transfer from my word document to this post???