The copyright conundrum

"the cone of shame" (2012) courtesy Flickr user torbackhopper.

For as long as I can remember,  copyright has been coupled with the word “protection” — for the author. The author needs to be protected against unsavory people who want to steal their work. Audferheide explains how our romantic view of authorship as a creative act by a single person making something out of nothing is leveraged by corporations and believed by communities of practice to lead us to a place of discomfort and self-censorship with building upon the creative works of others.

Hobbs turns our accepted idea of copyright protection inside out by explaining how copyright is really to promote the spread of ideas and culture, to protect and encourage authors who want to transform existing works of authors to express or develop a new idea or comment on the original work(s).

I see this happening with students and research projects. So often they go into the project thinking they have to create something new, and we don't talk enough about how we use the work of others in all of our thinking: very little that we create is new.  They look at the citations as a legalistic thing to not “plagiarize.” I know that copyright and citation are two different things, but the remix culture has a place in student research projects: the goal is to understand what other people thought about a topic and create some new thought of your own out of it.

I wonder what kinds of research projects students would create, and what kinds of lessons teachers would create we if we were to shed this crippling idea. Students should be required to create  a remix work that builds upon the work of others to develop their understanding of their fair use rights.

It makes me sad that many communities of practice have censored themselves and developed guilt and shame about their creativity. Our copyright conundrum is a consequence of neoliberalism: we have reified individual responsibilities and rights and sublimated responsibilities of institutions and groups so thoroughly that we have a hard time acccepting the value of collaborative creation and building upon the work of others. It is tempting to lay the blame for this loss on media companies who threaten and manipulate the public not to use their properties in legal ways.

However I think a good deal of the responsibility lies with educators who shy away, hide, deflect, and avoid. That would be me.

Works cited

Aufderheide, P. (2012). "Creativity Copyright and Authorship." In D. Gerstner & C. Chirs (Eds). Media authorship. New York: Routledge.

Ferguson, K. (2015). Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens. YouTube.

Hobbs, R. (2011) Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning. Thousand Oaks: Corwin/Sage. OR Media Education Lab (2008).