Creative ICT News

Creative Commons, Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights

 I read an interesting post on Doug Belshaw's blog this morning about how he has decided to "uncopyright" everything on it, leaving it up to the "consumer" as to whether they linked back or gave any credit to Doug in derivative works. This got me thinking about Creative Commons, of which I have always been a big fan. Everything on this blog has a Creative Commons license for re-use and remixing, all I require is an accreditation in the subsequent work. Doug's post, however got me questioning this as a valid strategy: is it arrogance to suggest that any of the musings/doggerel/resources that I post on here are worth protecting? Probably. Are not virtually all of my own ideas derivative of someone else's thinking? Most certainly.

On the other hand, by uncopyrighting everything it gives a degree of legitimacy to those wanting to pass off other folk's content as their own. A couple of years ago someone notified me of a blog that was just lifting my posts and pasting them into their own site without accreditation, and I have to admit I was pretty annoyed about it, going so far as to send the author a fairly robust email (which worked and they took my stuff off). How would you feel if material that you had created found its way onto unsavoury websites, or used by a political party whose views did not coincide with yours (e.g. the use of publicly licensed images of Winston Churchill and Spitfires by the BNP)?

Finally, Doug is in the enviable position of having someone pay his salary (he is an e-learning director of an academy in Northumberland) and therefore his motivation seems to be to share his thinking for others to take in any direction they want (I hope that's a reasonable summary of his position). I'm not, and I have to make a living by my own means. It seems reasonable, therefore to think that some sort of protection is needed. However, if one of my aims is to spread my reputation as far and wide as possible as someone who might make a difference to ICT in a school, would it not be better to uncopyright everything and rely on the ethical stance of most educational bloggers to link back and credit where credit's due?

What are the implications for work created on school blogs by children? Is uncopyrighting a step too far for this type of environment?

Ultimately, the kind of people who are happy to pass other people's work off as their own don't give two hoots about copyright, Creative Commons or any other type of intellectual property rights, so does it really make a difference? Maybe copyright is for the rich who can afford a lawyer?

Should I uncopyright? Still thinking about it...

Image by Gthomasbower under a CC license on Flickr

Acceptable Use Policy to download

As part of my work at St James' Primary School in Manchester I have had to update an old acceptable use policy from my days as ICT co-ordinator at Crumpsall Lane. It includes some guidance on the use of social networking by staff and an Internet access statement. We've given it a Creative Commons share and share alike attribution, so feel free to copy it and adapt it for your own (non-commercial) purposes.

Link to AUP

As an aside, we also wanted to find a data protection policy. While the ICT co-ord went to call the LA for a copy of their policy, I tweeted the fact that we needed such a policy from my phone, and by the time she returned saying that the LA were emailing her one, my PLN on Twitter had furnished me with several examples. Twitter is indeed my Google!

Most data protection policies seem to be wrapped in legalese, but this one from Wokingham doesn't seem too bad: Link to DPP.

This is what happens when a blog post bites you on the bum

I was just finishing my breakfast (toast with my Dad's excellent homemade rhubarb and pink grapefruit jam - sounds weird, but works really well) when the phone rang. To my surprise it was the east midland tones of Doug Dickinson that cheerily greeted me. The conversation was fairly brief and to the point and went roughly along the lines of "Do you remember that blog post you wrote a couple of weeks back suggesting that the language in the resource uploader in Honeycomb wasn't child friendly? Well, come up with something better, then!" I had to smile - he is absolutely right of course, no point at all in offering criticism without being prepared to suggest an alternative.

The sentence in the resource uploader currently reads as follows:

"I certify I have the right to distribute these resources within the group I have selected"

It looks like this:

The first point to make is that it's great that Softease are thinking about the issue of digital rights. Children ask questions when they get to this point. I have also been very successful in weaning them off standard image search engines and in recent projects year 6 have been tasked to provide an image credit for every image that they put on a web page. Most have managed to do this, and even those that haven't have used Compfight to find Creative Commons images to upload.

So to the crux of the matter: can I come up with a better form of words? Here's my first go:

"I certify that I created this resource, or have permission from its creator to use it"

I am not sure if this is perfect, but I think it's a little easier to understand and explain. Can anybody improve on this?