I’ve spent the week cleaning up my Flickr account, mostly employing better tags and re-setting rights. I got to thinking about how I assign rights to my work. If it’s my own and not tied to some project, I’m likely going to use Creative Commons. If I’ve manipulated someone else’s work or put pieces from a bunch of other perople’s work together, I’m going to reserve all rights, simply because there are rights present that aren’t mine to give.
A few months back, a student contacted me and asked if he could use one of Dead Bunny’s videos in a web site he was building for a class project. I was only too happy to give him permission.
It occurred to me that day, as it did while I was working through my photos, that I know far too many young people who would have just taken the video and never given it a second thought, simply because it was online. I’ve actually had repeated conversations with my students because they’ll actually tell me it’s okay to take something online. To them, it doesn’t matter. It’s online, free for the taking.
I’ll often ask how being available online makes it different from a book, where we make a ruckus about what they can use, how much they can use, and how they have to acknowledge it. It’s still something someone created and published. The only response I ever get back is, “Because it’s online. The internet is free.”
Now, these are kids who’ve probably never heard, either in or out of context, the phrase, “Information wants to be free”, although it comes to mind every single time I have this conversation, but they’re certainly ready to embrace it because we aren’t doing enough to help them see that media is media. We start by applying copyright symbols to web materials. Every citation guide in existence has quietly added online sources to their examples. But if we don’t talk about the copyright inherent in all media, then we’re going to continue having conversations with students about how protections extend to media, regardless of its form or location.







