A big concern of Dr. Hart as he
moves forward in with his own personal production of eBooks is the following of
all copyright laws. A copyright can be best described as a law that protects
any creative medium created independently. The basic guidelines of a working
copyright require the work to be represented in a physical medium, original,
have creative effort, and not be a form of name, title, or short phrase.
Another aspect of copyrights is
their infringement and fair use. Infringement is simply the override of a
copyright, when someone copies or uses a work illegally or without the proper
permission from the independent author. Violation of a copyright can happen
through distributing, copying, performing and so on even if not exactly word
for word. An example of copyright infringement could be when a company uses
aspects of another’s logo to create one very similar. However on the other
hand, there is the fair use doctrine that clarifies how a creative document can
be used by the public. Guidelines for fair use are incorporated into all
copyright laws in order to allow for areas such as Commentary and criticism of
the work or similar work, and parody, which is the exaggerated imitation of
work for entertainment purposes. An
example of fair use could be parody in the making of all the scary movies as
they mock horror films made in the current year.
While there are multiple ways to
encroach upon copyright law, one of the most common is through academic
dishonesty more specifically plagiarism. Plagiarism is using another person’s
idea and making it seem to be your own, it usually happens through improper quoting
and or repeating information without giving proper credit.
One of the most popular types of
copyright is on music. Music is allowed to be copied and placed on a cd or a
computer however the number of times one is legally allowed to do that is based
on the rights described by Digital Rights Management. DRM is included in many
different licenses and basically protects against casual copying. For example,
media sharing sites such as Mediafire. Music also requires permission to be
played in certain venues, on must have permission to play certain stuff in a
public locations.
Then there is Copyleft; “Copyleft
is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring
all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well” as described
by Cheon and Crooks in Digital Literacy. The biggest part of Copyleft is the
range of Creative Commons. Creative Commons offers a variety of different
segments that when applied to a work can control the public use, giving limited
rights to a person or all reuse rights. It allows for opportunities for the work
to be used in certain insurances without the hassle of a legal copyright.
