Composing educational resources/Copyright and our right to copy

Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium. The default is for works to be "All Rights Reserved" - meaning you cannot make copies without expressed permission from the copyright holder.

Before we do anything with educational resources, we need to consider the issue of copyright. Copyrights - or the rights of you and others to copy, directly impacts on your ability to create, reuse, and distribute educational resources. You need to ask yourself: Can you afford to use restricted content, and how does it restrict the way you use it? Should you use free for reuse content, and how would you know if something was restricted or free for reuse? Will you permit others to copy, create or redistribute your resources?

To do:

1. You should write one blog post with the title as "Copyright and our right to copy" that refers to the following readings:

• Wikipedia's History of copyright law
• Free culture by Lawrence Lessig
• Licensing and Creative Commons - Towards a Global Learning Commons: ccLearn By Ahrash Bissell and Jamie Boyle.
• The case for and against Creative Commons By Marco Fioretti

2. Your blog post should discuss all these resources ellaborate on why copyright is as it is, why how Lessig is claiming that we need "Free Culture", and what problems Fioretti has highlighted. Try to also contextualize these ideas into your own work and country.