SJS Teacher

I used Creative Commons once before to create my webpage on googlepages as an assignment in one of our graduate school classes. We also had the same discussion about copyright laws and how blurry those laws can sometimes be. It was also emphasized in the class that “educational use” was, more often than not, more loose than “personal use”.

In my opinion, copyright laws are more “reactive” as opposed to Creative Common laws being “proactive”. Creative commons tell you what you can use versus copyright laws telling you what you cannot. For an educator, this gives shows me opportunities to use something that you have been given permission to rather than being told what I cannot do.

That being said, it is of course important to emphasize to our students that intellectual property is something that needs to be respected. Sooner or later, they themselves will be musicians, poets, authors, etc. and they will be at the other end of the table, with other people downloading their products. I just hope that some of them will use the “some rights reserved” of CC rather than the “all rights reserved” of the C.