Thing #8 - Copyright & Creative Commons

PART 1: Copyright

After visiting the United States Copyright Office website http://www.copyright.gov/ I put together a quiz that I could use with my students to use a tool to teach them about current copyright law. Today I had some extra time near the end of the school day and decided to find out how familiar my 6th grade students are with the concept of copyright. Below is a copy of the quiz that I gave to my class. I displayed on my screen using my classroom LCD projector and then after reading each question we took a vote for the correct answer. This allowed for immediate discussion regarding why students chose to respond a certain way as well as discussion on the reason for the correct response to each specific questions. 

  

Copyright Quiz

How familiar are you with current copyright law?

1. TRUE or FALSE: A copyright is a law that protects an author’s work from being copied and used by another person without the author’s permission.
2. Copyrights may protect which of the following: (circle all that apply)
• a.         Making a copy of a book
• b.         Making copies of a music CD
• c.         Making copies of computer software
• d.         Making copies of photographs.
3. TRUE or FALSE: Copyrights only protect items that are published or have a label that says that they are copyrighted.
4. TRUE or FALSE: Copyrights protect names, titles, slogans and short phrases from being used by other people.
5. TRUE or FALSE: A copyright protects works of authorship, while a patent protects inventions or discoveries.
6. TRUE or FALSE: You can use a copyright to protect your ideas from being used by another person.
7. TRUE or FALSE: In general, copyrights last for the length of the lifetime of the author plus an additional 70 years.
8. TRUE or FALSE: It is permissible to use small amounts of copyrighted material including quotes, for the purpose of teaching others, news reporting, or for scholarly reports.
9. TRUE or FALSE: A person could be sued by the author of copyrighted CD by making copies and selling them.
10. TRUE or FALSE: Copyrights are important because they protect your work across the nation and if your work becomes popular, you get all the credit.

After the quiz was completed, I showed my students the Library of Congress video for students and teachers entitled "Copyright Exposed". A link and screen shot of the video is shown below.

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/copyrightmystery/#/copyright/

After completing the above activities with my students, I learned that they had some vague ideas of copyright laws, but were unfamiliar with specifics. For example, most of them knew that it was illegal to make copies of CDs but did not know that the copyright law also protected photographs or articles people have written and published on the Internet. The students were surprised to find out that their own articles and work is automatically protected from being copied even if it does not contain label indicating this. Overall, this was a helpful activity to promote discussion regarding respecting other people's work and how to appropriately give credit to the person to whom it belongs. 

PART 2: Creative Commons

Below are two screenshots of my Creative Commons license that I have included on my "Face of the Classroom" website. To see the license on my website, please visit http://gvbzone.weebly.com/index.html

Content Standards:

Aligned to NETS-T: 4.a

Connections to Marzano Strategies: Generating and Testing Hypothesis