Week 9: Copyright Laws and Creative Commons

This week’s post was about Copyright issues, and Creative Commons. I thought this is a very useful unit, especially for graduate students. This is particularly true, due to lack of sufficient knowledge, especially with graduate students working on their thesis or dissertation. This calls to a further more awareness of what the rules are, and what is necessary to abide by them.

Copyright laws and fair use is something very commonly heard of, especially in academia. Once someone enters a college or university, they’re subjected to parts of books under fair use. And this is very common. Nonetheless, it doesn’t always mean that people that people should take a ton of information out of a book for fair use. I think common sense is sometimes necessary, as well as knowledge of the laws.

As for the laws, one should be aware of them, and understand them. The Virginia Tech website titled Can I use it? expresses this greatly, and shows the rules and regulations greatly and clearly. This is very important to be aware of. In fact, the Virginia Tech Library website provides good resources for the copyright laws.

The most enjoyable part of this unit for me was learning about Creative Commons. Creative Commons, is a really brilliant idea that’s built off of the fact that people should share information together. Creative Commons allows people to choose the copy rights for their material according to the way the author makes it fit. However, there should be some type of leniency with how much people can do with it.  I played with Creative Commons for a bit, and I love how it’s clear to figure out what can be used and what can’t be used. I thought it was great.

I think this will be a useful resource once one begins to teach in academia, etc. Wonderful week! Thank you!