{"id":13,"date":"2008-02-14T14:20:49","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T14:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcglaysia.wordpress.com\/?p=13"},"modified":"2008-02-14T14:20:49","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T14:20:49","slug":"teens-and-intellectual-property-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/learning\/teens-and-intellectual-property-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Teens and Intellectual Property Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an article<\/a> today on Ars Technica<\/a> that talked about teens and how they do not understand copyright law<\/a>.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, students do not understand that downloading and copying songs and images from the Internet is illegal.\u00a0 Interestingly though one of the findings of the study revealed that most teens credit their own parents with anything they do actually know about copyright.\u00a0 This made me wonder what exactly we are teaching in schools about intellectual property rights.\u00a0 Do we assume that students know already that copying other people\u2019s work is wrong?\u00a0 Do we assume that students can extrapolate from the fact that stealing someone\u2019s lunch would be wrong, therefore stealing their ideas or their electronic work would also be wrong?\u00a0 Is all our \u201creminding\u201d them about citing sources and crediting authors based on an incorrect assumption, that they already know that they should not copy things from the web?\u00a0 I imagine myself nagging my students about copying from the web, and putting things in their own words and the blank looks I get back lead me to believe that I have become Charlie Brown\u2019s parents.<\/p>\n

While this is clearly a serious issue, I also wonder if we will be kicking ourselves i the future that we wasted our time on all this.\u00a0 Information and ideas want to be free.\u00a0 Intellectual property is an illusion.\u00a0 Once an idea is shared it becomes part of the collective intelligence.\u00a0 To repeat it, build on it and rework it should be everyone\u2019s right.\u00a0 Citing the origin of the idea remains important, but paying for the idea is ludicrous.\u00a0 Can I then extrapolate that, if a song is in the public domain I should be able to copy it, share it, remix it and improve on it, as long as I let everyone know the original work belongs to David Grohl?\u00a0 I think so.<\/p>\n

I think that, one day, likely soon, all information and intellectual property will be free.\u00a0 Free to use and share.\u00a0 Corporations and the RIAA are the ones that are resisting this evolution of information.\u00a0 They do not know how they will still make money.\u00a0 That is their problem.\u00a0 Information wants to be free and the democratic web will bring that about.<\/p>\n

Original Microsoft Research paper<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, Microsoft released findings from a small study of teens that shows that most teens do not understand intellectual property rights but that those that do are less likely to infringe on those rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11],"tags":[26,36,47,70],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning","category-sites-and-resources","tag-copyright","tag-free-information","tag-learning","tag-student"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcglaysia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}