Being involved in creating learning materials for so many years, I am very aware of copyright and “digital footprint”. Copyright has been an issue since photocopying materials became common, and the online world has complicated it even more. It’s something that often gets overlooked, especially since instructors add videos, images, readings and other elements they come across online, into their teaching as the course progresses. Most often received course content from instructors, or instructional designers which is full of copied and pasted images from the Internet. There seems to be a perception that if it’s online – then is open game. This is slowly changing, and most educational institutions have library staff who can help figure out copyright issues, and provide guidance. In my experience I’ve found their expertise to be indispensable!
One thing that is useful to do, is to model behaviour expected from students in the course materials. For example, if I use an image in a course, I make sure to cite the source and creative commons license in the course. In the academic courses, where students are expected to use APA or MLA, I will use that in the course as well. Even when permission has been granted to use an image or other content I make sure to credit the source.
Since images are most problematic in my experience, I try to use the Flickr Creative Commons licensed images, MorgueFile images, or google image searches filtered by usage rights. Finding images is not so hard, but it can be cumbersome to properly attribute the source. For this I use ImageCodr to speed things up. (See my e-portfolio blog post for details on how to do this.) And another online tool I find useful for finding the sources of those mysterious images that show up in instructor PowerPoints is called TinEye. You just upload the image, to do a reverse image search.
Culture
Culture does impact views on intellectual property. In cultures that are less individualistic, and more collaborative, the students often work on assignments together. This “borrowing of ideas” can be viewed as cheating or plagiarism by others. For example in Punjabi folk songs, the melody is “borrowed” from an other musician, and new lyrics are crafted and added into the old. Often the new lyrics will include a reference to the original song or songwriter as a respectful acknowledgement in the new rendition. As no one “steals” from bad musicians, in a way it compliments the musician whose ideas were taken and developed. This is really different than what is mainstream. Consider the famous copyright infringement case between Queen/David Bowie and Vanilla Ice.