Digital Citizenship/Secondary/Copyright, copyleft & plagiarism

Learn

 * Video introduction to copyright YouTube Copyright School
 * Video introduction to Creative Commons Building on the Past and Creative Commons Kiwi
 * Watch: Credit is Due – The Attribution Song
 * For ideas and templates for notetaking
 * A video introduction to plagiarism


 * Here’s a poster about avoiding plagiarism that might be useful to display for your students.

You should always credit the original creator when you reuse their work. This guide from Creative Commons Australia clearly outlines how to do that. Don’t forget to teach students about useful referencing tools, such as Zotero, that make referencing much easier to manage. Here's some help to apply Creative Commons licences to your own work.

Recall
This game reinforces the different licences and makes students think about how you can mix and match different licence types.

Think

 * What is the purpose of copyright?
 * If we didn’t have copyright, would we still have creative work? Why or why not?
 * What’s the difference between plagiarism and ‘inspiration’?
 * What’s the difference between owning a song and owning a car?
 * Give your own definition of plagiarism.
 * Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: An engrossing presentation from the founder of Creative Commons. He outlines some of the effects of current copyright legislation, and gives the political case for copyright reform. Good discussion starter.

Act
Display these posters in your school, for the classroom and for the staffroom

Expand

 * Lawrence Lessig Ted Talk: 20 min presentation from Lessig, arguing that the current copyright regime reverse the intent of the copyright clause of the US Constitution: i.e. it restricts, rather than encourages, creativity.
 * New York Magazine: Where Have I Read That Before?
 * Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: Chapter One, pages 20-30, discusses the story of Disney’s use of public domain material in the early 20th century to produce Mickey Mouse.
 * Everything is a Remix Kirby Ferguson speaks about the impact of remixing on creativity through a series of videos and presentations.

Creative Commons Policies
In most situations, the works produced by a teacher in a school (handouts, resources, lesson plans) are owned by their employer. Sadly this means that teachers who want to share their teaching and learning materials need to gain written permission from their employer before they can legally do this. Some schools make the process of sharing easier by adopting a Creative Commons Policy which makes all material produced by a teacher available under a CC-By licence. Examples of Creative Commons policies include:


 * Albany Senior High School
 * Warrington School

Remixing Creative Commons Content

 * The National Library's guide to remixing content.
 * Even Youtube offers a very full-featured video editor which can be used to remix CC-licenced content.
 * How to re-use Creative Commons content in Youtube (Youtube's guide to copyright)

Contributors

 * Matt McGregor, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand
 * Mark Osborne, Albany Senior High School
 * Dorothy Burt, Pt England School
 * Esther Casey, National Library of New Zealand
 * Free to Mix: An educator’s guide to reusing digital content, National Library, Services to Schools