Copyright!

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.