Digital Information - Lesson 11: Intellectual Property

Overview

Students are asked to reflect on who owns their creative works from this class, such as their pixel images, before reading an article describing how ownership can become complicated as analog works become digital artifacts. After reading the article, students watch several videos explaining copyright and introducing them to the Creative Commons. Students then re-read the article answering three questions about the benefits, harms, and impacts of current copyright policy. Students use their new understanding of copyright to form an opinion about current copyright policies and create a small poster justifying their opinion with a quote from the article.

Goals

Students will be able to:

• Explain how copyright and Creative Commons Licenses can be applied to digital works of creativity
• Argue if current copyright laws are helping or harming society using evidence from an article

Purpose

Students have been examining how digital information is created and stored, but they have not closely examined the question of who owns their digital data and what rules govern how that information can be shared. This lesson introduces the concept of copyright by presenting students with an article that challenges their current understanding of digital ownership and makes them wrestle with some of the complexities of owning and sharing digital information. It's important for students to talk through their ideas and hear the perspectives of their peers as they try to unpack how copyright law can impact society. Ultimately, students begin to form their own opinions about copyright focusing on how these policies impact the world around us and observing who benefits and who is harmed in particular copyright situations.

This lesson is also a scaffold to the larger project that begins after this lesson which includes several tasks that are also a part of this lesson such as, annotating an article, answering questions, and forming an opinion using the article as evidence. Students may need support with these processes during this lesson so they are able to complete the following lesson independently. It is especially important that students use marking the text strategies to help them comprehend and synthesize the information from their article, because they will need to do this in the next lesson as well.

Resources

For the students

• Article - Fortnite Stealing Dance Moves
• Video - Copyright Overview
• Video - Copyright in Practice
• Video - Creative Commons Copyright

Getting Started (5 minutes)

Prompt: Imagine you were using some of our pixelation tools to create an image and you posted it online for your friends to see - but, a week later you find out someone took that image and put it on a T-shirt that they're selling for $10 each. How would you feel in this situation?

Remarks

• When you create materials on the computer, you own them - they are your "Intellectual Property". Using materials created by someone else and trying to pass them off as your own is plagiarism when you don't have the creator's permissions. There may even be legal consequences for using these materials!
• However, we can see from our discussion that it can be complicated when we talk about ownership of digital information. Today we are going to explore these issues.

Activity (30 mins)

Activity Part 1: Read the Article

Distribute: Article - Fortnite Stealing Dance Moves

Do This: Students read the article. After they are finished reading they should mark up the text with the following:

Prompt: This article brings up issues around copyright. Based on what you've read and your own experiences, what questions do you have about copyright?

Prompt: Are our current copyright policies helping society or hurting society?

Activity Part 2: Copyright Overview (10 minutes)

Before we can really discuss this question, we need some additional background information. We are going to watch three videos. Our goal is to better understand the rules of copyright, and to better understand when we can reuse or remix something.

• Video #1: Copyright Overview
• Video #2: Copyright in Practice
• Video #3: Creative Commons Copyright

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Activity Part 3: Article Re-read (10 minutes)

• Now that we better understand the rules & controls of copyright, we're going to re-read this article to see if we can determine if current copyright policies are helping or hurting society

Prompt: Consider our earlier prompt again -- are our current copyright policies helping society or hurting society?

Do This: Have students re-read the article in order to answer these questions:

• What was digitized?
• What was the goal or purpose of digitizing this thing?
• Is someone benefiting from this situation? If so, who?
• Is someone being harmed in this situation? If so, who?
• Are these impacts intended or unintended? How do you know?

Students should continue to annotate or record quotes from the article to do the following:

• Identify sentences that show benefit
• Identify sentences that show harm
• Identify sentences that show impact

Prompt: Share some of the sentences you annotated. Did everyone identify the same areas?

Wrap up (5 Minutes)

Remarks

• You need to take a stand on today's question, using this article to help support your position. We will do this by creating a position poster so we can see how everyone feels about Copyright based on this article.

Do This:

• Distribute paper to each student. Have students fold the paper in half.
• In the top section, complete this sentence stem: "I think copyright can [help / hurt] society because ..."
• In the bottom section, provide a quote from the text that helps justify the sentence you wrote in the top

Circulate: Check in with students and encourage them to use one of their highlighted sentences as evidence for their opinion. As students finish, they hang them in a public space edge-to-edge like a quilt to form a larger tapestry of opinions about copyright with evidence. This class artifact can hang in the classroom as a reference for the next few lessons.

• Today we learned about Creative Commons, a license that allows you to freely use materials created by others. There are a few other licenses that you may have heard about that also allow access:
• Open Source: programs that are made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.
• Open Access: online research output free of restrictions to access and use
• You do have options when you want to ethically use others materials! Because of these licenses, we have access to a wide variety of digital materials.
• To close, when you use these materials, always make sure to cite where you go these sources. Citations come in many forms - it could be a link, or a description of where you got the source. There are formal versions of citations recommended by various organizations, but genearlly the most important thing to remember when citing a source is to provide as much information as possible about the materials you are using.

Assessment: Check for Understanding

For Students

Open a word doc or google doc and copy/paste the 2 following question.

Question 1

How is a Creative Commons license different from a regular copyright?

Question 2

Now that we understand Copyright, what would need to change in order for the scenario from the warm-up to be okay? As a reminder, here was the scenario from the warm-up: Imagine you were using some of our pixelation tools to create an image and you posted it online for your friends to see - but, a week later you find out someone took that image and put it on a T-shirt that they're selling for $10 each.

Standards Alignment

• CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards (2017): IC - Impacts of Computing: 3A-IC-28 - Explain the beneficial and harmful effects that intellectual property laws can have on innovation.
• CSP2021: IOC-1.F.1, IOC-1.F.2, IOC-1.F.3, IOC-1.F.4, IOC-1.F.5, IOC-1.F.6, IOC-1.F.7

Next Tutorial

In the next tutorial, we will discuss CSP Digital Information Lesson 12 , which describes impacts of digital information.