Copyright issues
Intellectual property vs real property what a hot issue. If I put my blog online and say something really brilliant, does it remain my property or can anyone use it? Is knowledge a openly traded commodity? Should we guard our knowledge, never put it out there for others? If I write something for the Net, should I expedt it to stay there, untouched by any keyboard? Or if I upload something to the Net, do I expect it to be downloaded, massaged, and put into other sites or forms? Look at the shareware sites, that used to be free software. Well, it is still free but "things" have been added to that software, that the user will end up buying the software instead of dealing with the pop-ups and gremlins from the freeware. But I digress, I see the problem, as well as two sides of the issue. Do I think it is fair that people should be paid for making a product, i.e. movie, music, book.
2 comments:
There is a lot of stuff out there for free that is still really good (your blog, for instance, or on-line office suites like googledocs and Zoho), but I certainly agree with the dilemma. I think a lot of it boils down to your purpose. If you want to protect your ideas and/or be paid for them, a blog is probably not the best place to express yourself. The question becomes, for us as educators, do we charge other teachers for using our ideas? What if our lesson plan was really based of someone else's? Can we call that our own since we posted it on-line first?
Copyright issues is such a touchy subject. Even as an adult, I get confused what I can use and can't. We really need to educate our students. They are breaking copyright laws left and right; and most of them don't even know it. Its like we all need a copyright class at the beginning of school that lays everything out as a teacher of do and don't. When it comes to what is safely mine that no one can copy. Its a hit or miss thing. As teacher, we seem to share, borrow and steal a lot of great ideas and change it a little to make it our own.
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