Response to week 12 readings

As an educator I haven’t spent that much time worrying about copyright laws, but I guess I should.  I found chapter 7 of the Digital History book to be interesting and informative.  I was unsure what the “public domain” meant, but now I understand that it means these items are free of copyright restrictions.  I also liked the advice to look for a royalty free version of an image/document before just paying money to Corbis.  In trying to decide what material is in the public domain and what is copyrighted, I thought the chart in the book explained this well. 

The idea of “fair use” still seems a bit confusing to me because there aren’t any hard and fast rules in this area.  I guess I always thought that if I was only using a part of a document or a chapter of a book in the classroom, then I was okay.  But Digital History points out that if I am using this year after year, then that may be a different story and it might not fall under fair use. 

I also found chapter 8 of Digital History to be interesting, but also scary.  I never spent that much time considering the idea that information in a digital format may not be accessible one day.  I should think about this b/c I have several really old floppy disks from when I was a little kid and I can’t find a computer equipt to read them.  The advice of saving documents/images in different ways does seem helpful, but I don’t know what some of these formats are (like ASCII or Unicode.)

After reading the plagarism case involving a CCSU student, I think I may bring this in for my students in high school.  They don’t seem to realize that plagarism is a very serious matter and can have a real effect on your life.  I don’t think anyone will know for sure who copied who in this case b/c the dates on the digital files can be changed.  I wonder if they did find out that the female was guilty of plagarism, what would happen to her??