A Brief Overview of Copyright: Slides

In the Creative Commons Certificate Course for Educators I’m taking at the moment, our assignment for Unit 2 (on copyright law) was to create something that provides the basics of copyright. One option was:

Create a video, slide presentation, or infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the basics of copyright law as covered in Module 2. Make an effort to create something that would be useful and interesting to someone else.

At a minimum, include descriptions of:

  1. the purpose of copyright,
  2. what is copyrightable and what is not,
  3. the relationship between copyright and other methods of protecting intellectual property,
  4. how a person receives copyright protection for their work,
  5. the public domain, and
  6. exemptions to copyright like fair use.

The instructions for all assignments in this course are publicly available.

For the Unit 1 assignment I made an infographic, but this time there was just too much information to include in a small space. So I decided to do some kind of presentation.

The conceptual structure I chose (a series of questions: what, who, why, when, when not) called out for a Prezi, because then I could include the information within each heading/question really easily. But then I discovered that Prezi is not accessible (at least, Prezi Next is not).

So I went with the tried and true Power Point. As with my previous assignment, I spent a lot of time ensuring adequate colour contrast for accessibility. I didn’t add alt text to the icons except in one place, because the icons are for decorative purposes; I ensured that (nearly) all required information is in the text (the one place where the icon added more, I added alt text).

This was a bit challenging because usually when I make slides I do so for a talk/presentation/workshop, and that means I’ll be speaking while showing them so I can give information orally. Here I had to include all information on the slides themselves because they are serving a standalone purpose. Hence, there is more text on these slides than I usually include!

You can see the slides on Speakerdeck, and download them in Power Point format for editing on the Open Science Framework.