Mixing, ripping, burning, mashing…these are common words in our vocabulary.  They are said and enacted without thinking twice about the implications to intellectual property.  Most of us would remember the Napster case, but few of our students would recall it.  To many people the question of downloading is more along the lines of why pay for something when you can download the song, movie, or book from the internet?

It would be wonderful to live in a Utopian state in which the importance of Foucault’s author subject has decreased (Philip, 2005), and we all worked together for a collective technological good.  This would enable mass creativity in the arts, science and technology and a “shared imagination” (Philip, 2005, p. 213), but who would pay for the work to be done?  On the other hand, the collective unity that has been demonstrated in the Creative Commons and the creation of free Web 2.0 tools has been phenomenal.

How do we distinguish between good piracy and illegal piracy?  Though Lessig believes copy and paste is okay, he still believes recognition should be provided to the original author.  I am finally beginning to gain clarity (after five MET courses!) of copyright.  Students need to reference their sources.  They can do mashups and use others’ ideas, but they need to indicate their understanding of whose IP it is.  Don indicated in another post the importance of using Bloom’s taxonomy to encourage students to analyze and synthesize texts and concepts.  This ensures critical thinking and places value on student’s own ideas.

While looking into Canadian Copyright and the IP discussion, I got caught up reading the debate about the Canadian “Fair Dealing” clause and recent changes to copyright law in Bill C-11.  I was most interested in how the changes would affect education. The laws haven’t come into affect yet but provide more exceptions to use copyrighted material in the classroom. For an overview of the issues check out this article.  My interpretation of these changes would mean students and teachers can use texts, songs, pictures and videos for educational purposes, as long as there is no commercial use and correct referencing is completed.