Over the last few years I've been thinking about copyright and intellectual property. I haven't been thinking about it a stop-students-from-cheating kind of way (although that is an important element). Mainly I've been wondering about how to act with integrity and honour creators and their work. The internet has really complicated issues of copyright. This video gives one weird but not so uncommon example:
Like John Green, I want to honour the work of other people, but I'm not always convinced that not sharing the work of other artists is the best way to do this. My own example involves a dance recital for my kids. I recorded some of their performance in order to share it with some family members who live in other countries and who miss the small pleasures of family growing up. I uploaded the videos to YouTube with a semi-private setting, but within two days, YouTube removed one of the videos because someone complained that the music excerpt the kids were dancing to was copyright protected. I'm not upset with YouTube, but I wonder how the artist would feel about the situation. Is the artist being honoured or his/her livelihood being protected by preventing dancers from using their music or me from sharing it?
Technically I haven't shared anything that I've learned, and this is a learning log, so here is a video by John's brother Hank (you can check them out on YouTube at vlogbrothers) explaining some of what I've learned about copyright and how the internet is forcing us to change the way we think about intellectual property.
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