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Copyright and fair use

ism tech

Posted Thursday, 21 February 2008

For my students, here’s a quick summary of some links and materials on copyright and fair use.

The content on this web site is copyrighted and available through an alternative scheme called Creative Commons. I’ve chosen a license that lets anyone share, remix and modify my work, as long as they give me credit for the original work. As this page explains, the CC license allows me to claim “some rights reserved”, which is less restrictive than the “all rights reserved” terms of copyright, but provides me more rights than placing my work into the public domain where no one owns anything. These videos explain the CC system, and there is also a FAQ.

The Creative Commons scheme also works well on the Internet, as the licenses can be attached to electronic documents and files. The Internet works like a copy machine, as Kevin Kelly pointed out in this January 2008 article. I discussed this issue in this 4 February 2008 post.

A couple of times a week, one of my monitoring tools will tell me that an automated script has been scraping my RSS feed and reposting my content on a fake blog. If they give me credit for my work, I leave them alone. After all, I’m not claiming copyright on my this blog.

Fair use lets people post or republish a small portion of someone else’s work, as long as proper attribution or creedit is included. That’s a key reason why I have my students use TurnItIn.com to submit assignments.