In today’s tech class, we watched a 90 minute documentary called “Rip! A Remix Manifesto” that discussed and explored copyright laws and the creation of content. The movie was filmed in 2008 and was narrated by Brett Gaylor. In the movie, Gaylor discussed many copyrights issues but mainly focused on music, and even closely followed one of his favourite bands GirlTalk, who remixes and mashing old songs to create new ones. This movie allowed me to really think about copyrights and how I too am a copyright criminal. As I child, I downloaded music illegally using sites such as LimeWire or others that allowed for you to take YouTube URLs and converted them into Mp3’s but never did I consider the actual risks I was taking by downloading that music. This shocked me that I was so careless to download song when one of my biggest fears is to be accused of plagiarism on a university paper. In the movie, it discussed how young students, or their parents were being fined thousands of dollars from songs that had been downloaded to their computers and were even facing jail time. Could you imagine sitting in History class and being served legal papers for downloading a SONG! Now say you pay those fees, guess who gets the money? The filthy rich publishing or record companies and the poor artist who created the actual content sees nothing. Now doesn’t that make you want to download the song for free.
This movie really got me thinking about how I will be able to avoid copyright issues in my future career. If I borrow a lesson plan from the internet, is that a violation of a copyright law? In class today, we went on further to discuss open educational resources, such as the two sites I have linked below. These sites allow for you to obtain lesson ideas and other educational resources without worrying about violating a copyright law. They are shared freely and openly using the creative commons license which makes it legal for anyone to reuse, improve, and even redistribute the content. I believe that these two sites will be so beneficial as a new teacher going into a practicum for the first time, looking for ideas on lessons.
Links:
Video:
- https://www.nfb.ca/film/rip_a_remix_manifesto/
Open Educational Resources:
