I often encounter disregard for copyright not only in students’ projects, term or graduation papers, but also beyond classroom. When I hear a popular song in a café, I always wonder: have the owners of this café asked the musicians, or their legal representatives, for permission to use their music for commercial purposes. Why exactly would this use be commercial? Because the music also affects the income of this café: music attracts customers. If it didn't, there would be no music in cafés. But it does. Visitors, who order just tea and sip it for an hour or so, can have come here to listen and relax, not to eat. Here is another case. Some artists don’t like to compose music, but can play it. They take someone else’s songs and do a concert, singing them. Or release an entire album of covers. Both the café owners and the music artists get paid for their work. But what about those who created the original and whose work was used without asking? Do creators deserve to get paid if their art brings income to somebody else? I hope you agree with me that they do.
To take other people’s creations, intellectual property (songs, writings, photos, paintings, computer programs, etc.) without asking is the same as to take any material thing. Although on a different scale. It is easier to copy and paste a text than to steal a whole LEGO set at a store. Hardly anyone will notice copy-pasting, as there are so many texts and many of them are very alike. Copy-pasting is more like stealing a couple of LEGO bricks from a promo set that was put in a store for customers to try out constructing something on the spot. Throughout its history, LEGO has produced 650 000 000 000 bricks (How, do you think, I know that?..). The company can afford “promo sets” that will be shoplifted at product presentations. Most often, this is how we take others intellectual property, on the principle of "De minimis non curat lex" (Latin: "The law does not concern itself with trifles") , knowing that the copyright holder will either not notice what happened, or won’t waste time to figure it out.
I am of the opinion that even in an educational situation, while preparing a "test" project, you need to overcome the desire to steal promo bricks take someone else’s content. Moreover, it primarily means BEING CREATIVE YOURSELF, creating your own writings, images, audio and video files. Of course, there is hardly enough time to fulfill all ideas or come up with something absolutely original. In this regard, owners of intellectual property, professional artists, musicioans,etc., can be generous and allow free use of their work in others' projects. But first, we need to be sure that the content we want to use is free.
Copyright is very well described on the Google Support site here. The YouTube service also provides detailed instructions to users, so that their videos won’t have to be deleted due to violation of copyright. But all these instruction can be tricky. For example, live streaming of video games may fall under the copyright even if the video is allowed to stream: in games the soundtrack is often not allowed to distribute.
Copyright is a broad field of law. There are lots of sources with recommendations how not to violate it. Do you have to deal with all this in my course? I will try to help you out and simplify the task. Below, I will describe a few typical copyright situations that my students got involved in, while carrying out projects in the course of digital culture. These will briefly deal with facts, quoting, referencing, and checking the rights for content that you want to use in your projects.
How do I know that LEGO has produced 650 billion bricks? When I was writing an introduction to this section, I decided to surprise you with the enormity of this number. So, I typed "how many bricks LEGO produced" in the search bar, opened the first link, which, of course, was a Wikipedia article and found a quote from the "Time" magazine. Its article, published in 2008, stated: "Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements." (Note that this is a quote from the original text, so I put it in quotation marks. The full text of the article is here.) However, since 2008 this number should have increased, so I opened the next link from the search: a post in the blog of the tour operator "Jazz Tour", entitled “EVERYTHING you wanted to know about LEGO”. The post is dated 2014, and it states that the number is 650 billion. However, the source from which the author took this information (and all other information on LEGO) is not specified. Here is another source, which says that there are actually 485 billion bricks ever produced. But here it is again 650 billion in total. Next is a 2018 BBC article that states: LEGO sells 75 billion bricks a year. Turns out, if we trust the "Time" until 2008 and then consider the information from BBC, since 2008 LEGO should have produced 75*11=825 billion (I'm doint the calculation in 2019), which in total gives 400+825=1,225 billion. Well, what a complicated story.. By the way, the mentioned BBC article says that LEGO has problems due to an excessive number of produced pieces: the old models aren’t selling, as customers are used to constant appearance of new products. I would expect BBC to give the exact number of the bricks produced, but it's not there, even in the paragraph "LEGO in numbers"! Which makes me think that LEGO hides the true state of affairs at its warehouses and production lines, so as not to influence the investers’ opinion about the company.
This is how facts become factoids: when reliable sources have left something unsaid, unreliable sources filled in the blanks. Thus, when I said earlier about 650 billions LEGO bricks I most likely retold a factoid - something that looks like a fact, but is very hard to prove and comes from sources with a doubtful reputation or no reputation at all. Although, if we open the first few links shown by the search engine, it seems like a fact for a while. As more and more mismatches appear, it becomes clear that many sources just copy-paste information without checking it. Well-known journals and magazines, publishers with a reputation of professionals can be considered reliable sources. They do make mistakes, hide and gloss over the facts sometimes, because people err, but they work on their mistakes and are very protective of their reputation. In this whole LEGO story, the Time and BBC serve as reliable sources, and blogs and social media posts from little-known authors and non-official representatives are not recommended to rely on. There are, of course, famous bloggers whose posts can be trusted in certain matters. For example, the blog of the writer Boris Akunin is considered to be a reliable source on many history topics. But even in this blog, as its genre is quite informal compared to news portals and scientific journals, the originals and primary sources are not always mentioned, or not fully specified. Therefore, you have more chances to generate a new factoid by referring to blogs.
Let’s sum up:
Factoids should be avoided. By retelling someone else's mistake in your text and presenting it as a fact, you spread misleading information.
Facts must be taken from reliable publications. Major official publications (scientific, journalistic, documentary and legal) are considered reliable.
For all the facts you mentioned that you did not personally witness (even if they are popular facts like Shakespeare's birthday), you must specify a reliable source. If there are several facts and the source is the same, you can specify once that everything related to this topic is taken from this source.
All other people’s words, that make up a sequence of three or more words (if it is not a term), should be placed in quotation marks or formatted so that the text differs from your own words. You need to explain to the reader (to make it clear) that the text with this format is someone else's text, not written by you.
The original source of all others' texts should be specified near these texts. In science and law, there are very strict rules how to do it.
Does it all mean that I cannot surprise my readers with facts about LEGO? Yes, I can and I want to surprise them, as the readers get easily bored. (Are you? :) ) But I'll have to think a bit more on what is fact so that it doesn't become a factoid. Again, what is known from reliable sources? By 2008, more than 400 billion bricks were produced. In 2018, the annual sale was estimated as 75 billion. I can't be mistaken if I just take the first number: it's huge and already quite surprising. But if my appetite demands more, I can add these two numbers together. And, although I still have the years 2009-2017 and 2019 unaccounted for, I can hardly be mistaken in saying that… drum roll…
Drum roll:
(By the way, the audio is taken from the free YouTube audio library, and the background picture with LEGO is from the the stock with free Google images.)There are quite a few different ways to explain to people what they can and cannot do with content. The most common one is the copyright symbol. In Russia, its use is regulated by GOST (Governmental standard of the Russian Federation). GOST standards, in fact, regulate a lot of important processes. For example, manufacturers cannot put moths in food, all thanks to GOSTs. And thanks to GOST R 7.0.1-2003, in Russia we know that the symbol © followed by the author's name and the year of creation/publication means that this "work of science, literature and art, which is the result of creative activity, regardless of the purpose and dignity of the work, the way it is expressed, existing in any objective form" can not be copied and modified without permission. Most often, for texts, this means that you can not quote more than one sentence, even if you are doing it for non-commercial purposes. Consider that you study modern literature and your thesis, which contains extracts from Joanne Rowling's novel, will be posted on the university website. The readers should not end up reading the whole novel from your thesis. In the case of movies and computer games, this means a ban on episodes and evem screenshots without consent of the copyright holder. This consent is specified, for example, in the license for a movie or game: you just have to read the license however boring it can be. If a long period of time has passed since the author's death, then the copyright for his or her works ceases to apply. This period varies in different countries, but most often it is 50-70 years. There is a map on Wikipedia where you can look at the current time frame. By the way, Wikipedia explains how its files can be used under all of its files. After the statute of limitations expires, decent people still indicate the authorship, however, copying and modifying the original is allowed.
Another international way to explain that content is protected is by putting "All rights reserved" on it. Since signing the Buenos Aires Convention in 1910, this phrase has meant that the work is not in the public domain: if you want to use it, pay for it or negotiate its usage with the author in some other way. Today, the copyright already protects any work from automatically becoming public. But sometimes the phrase is still written rather as a warning ("Beware of the dog!"). If you see this phrase, don't you mess with the copyright holder!
One of the most common ways to claim your rights to content on the Internet is to put a link to an international license under which you would like to distribute your content. One of the most known licenses is "Creative Commons". At the bottom of this page, you can see a statement that this content is licensed under a non-commercial international Creative Commons license. This means that you don’t need to pay for my content to distribute it freely, but you must always mention the author (or give a link to the original text). This license also has a special symbol system. For example, a little man in a circle means "specify the author", the crossed-out dollar is for "non-commercial content". You can get the same form for your site by answering questions on the Creative Commons site. As a result, you will receive an html-code that you can add to your site, just like I did.
To sum up:
If there is a copyright sign and, moreover, "All rights reserved", do not to copy, modify and re-publish the content. However.. (go to the next line..)
If the author/copyright holder has specified what they allow you to do with their work, do it.
There are international licenses that easily and simply indicate what you can do with this content.
After the statute of limitations expires, copyright for the works ceases to apply.
By the way, there are libraries with content available for free. Such as the YouTube music library and the Google images I mentioned above.
I highly recommend watching the film about copyright "Good copy, bad copy" (available in English with subtitles). It explains many ambiguous issues with copyright law and their roots. By the way, the film is in the public domain.