RUNNING HEAD: YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work

YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work: A Proactive Approach to Youth Copyright Education Diane Daly University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science Final Paper: IRLS 584 with Kristy Mathieson Fall 2011

RUNNING HEAD: YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work: A Positive Approach to Youth Copyright Education

Copyright education for youth today is administered through a variety of online tools, many designed to teach young people the basics of copyright law using graphics and interactive formats. However, the more prominent lessons online that teach about copyright law for a young audience simplify their complex subject by guiding young users away from much of the spectrum of Fair Use and of all use that is within their rights. Extra-prohibitive qualities in the simpler of these presentations include the inflation of factors that could weigh against fair use into deciding factors ruling it out, and emotional statements intended to indoctrinate young people into the belief that using the work of others, and having ones own own works reused by others, is harmful. None of these presentations reflects reuse, collaboration, or sharing in a positive light. Meanwhile, a compelling case has been made that youth culture is altering the landscape of information use and reuse and making great strides toward restoration of the balance of copyright in practice. I designed the presentation and accompanying website YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work! in November 2011 to address what I saw as a gap between what young people are taught about copyright and what their rights and responsibilities can include, and to invite youth to play proactive roles in the resistance of copyright culture and the formation of better cultural protocols for the sharing of creative works. YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work! was designed in response to shortcomings in todays intellectual property education for youth, which can be seen in two popular educational tools available online: A website, Copyright Kids!; and the simple Cyberbee interactive tool in Flash.

RUNNING HEAD: YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work Beginning with the simpler presentation, the Cyberbee Flash learning object is

adorable, interactive, and extremely easy to understand. Yet it achieves that simplicity by erring on the side of caution. Witness this exchange from it: [Student Question] Wow! I can show everybody my project by putting it on my web page, right? [Answer] Not quite. When you put your material on a Web page, then it's being shown to an audience outside your school. If you have copyrighted material, normally exempted for student projects within a school, your project no longer falls under the fair use umbrella (From the Cyberbee interactive tool) The legal definition of Fair Use requires that multiple factors be considered, which presents a challenge for a simple presentation directed at youth. Unfortunately, this presentation addresses that challenge by inflating one factor weighing against fair use unrestricted access and making it appear to be a deciding factor. As a result, youth are steered away from posting any work incorporating reuse on the internet, with no mention of the numerous factors that could allow the work to be posted online, such as Transformative or Productive use, a small amount of the original work being used, or the lack of their uses effect on the used works market. (Russell 2004, p. 20) As Renee Hobbs of the Media Education Lab at Temple University has emphasized in her proactive presentation encouraging the legal use of copyrighted works, the broadness of fair use should not be allowed to result in teaching avoidance of that provision: MYTH: FAIR USE IS TOO UNCLEAR AND COMPLICATED FOR ME; ITS BETTER LEFT TO LAWYERS AND ADMINISTRATORS.

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TRUTH: The fair use provision of the Copyright Act is written broadly because it is designed to apply to a wide range of creative works and the people who use them. Fair use is a part of the law that belongs to everyone. (Hobbs 2009, Slide 23) However, notwithstanding their educational purposes and their inclusion of basic definitions of fair use, copyright presentations for youth systematically avoid including the extensive information about fair use that would be needed to take full advantage of it. Instead they counsel young people to avoid any uses that have the potential to invite criticism or legal challenges. Considering the increasing influence of what Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins have labeled rights culture (2006, p.21), most fair and incidental uses of the works of others now have some chance of inviting criticism or legal challenges, even if they are in fact legal uses. The copyright education tool that tops Google search results for copyright for kids is Copyright Kids!, a website by the Friends of Active Copyright Education (FAE), which is an initiative of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. This website relies on basic html presentation with linked pages, and one of the first pages young people go to, Why Should I Care About Copyright?, begins with the indoctrination of rights culture: When you create something, aren't you proud of your work when you spend a lot of time and energy creating it? How about that social studies report you finally finished, that poem for your Mom that made her smile, that cool logo you came up with for your soccer team, the great song you wrote for the school play, or even your journal that you don't "have" to do but you enjoy it so much and it's special to you? Well, all these are your creations and you'd probably be pretty upset if someone just copied any of them without your permission. That's where copyright comes in. (From Copyright Kids!)

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With these words, the young person still forming judgments about copyright is being told that the appearance of their work anywhere but where they control it is something to be pretty upset about. This is also the intention of one of the eleven Q&A sets in the Cyberbee presentation, when a youth considering using a copyrighted source asks: Who's going to know? [Answer] You'll know! Besides, put yourself in the author's place. What if you had created a great thing-a-ma-jig, but someone else got credit? Or worse, what if you could sell lots of thing-a-ma-jigs, but someone made a copy so now no one would buy them? The threat of market loss asserted in the passage above is out of proportion to the use suggested, and unlikely in terms of todays sharing protocols. More disturbing problems with copyright presentations for youth, however, have been identified via deeper analysis. Yar (2008) has analyzed several of these including Copyright Kids!, and has defined their purpose not as education in the laws of intellectual property, but rather as components within a barrage of antipiracy campaigns aimed at children, intended to brand piracy as criminal and morally reprehensible in order to serve capital interests and accumulation of the copyright industry. (2008) Another sweeping problem with the youth copyright presentations examined is that they assert stratifications in the world of information that the savvy young user will view as outdated, and whatever sincere educational value the presentations may have held gets discredited by association. In a book chapter entitled The Digital Moment: The End of Copyright?, Siva Vaidhyanathan (2001) has credited this millenniums digital moment with collapsing the very distinctions these presentations hinge upon, including distinctions amonggaining access to a work; using (we used to call it reading) a work; and copying a work (p. 152) and that between producers and consumers of information and culture. (p. 153) Rights culture is still the

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dominant force in legislation; it is in community practice that this new culture has taken root. When students view these extra-prohibitive copyright websites and learning objects, they are contrasted in their minds with what they see in practice: Mashups, remixes, parodies, and original creators who support these reuses or at least benefit from them. It is a sunnier world that seems to forget all about copyright as far as these students understand it. I did not find resources on Copyright directed at youth that support work reuse, collaboration, or sharing, nor anything encouraging young people to assert control over copyright, whether as creators today or as decision-makers with further impact in the future. Meanwhile, interactions between young people and information are already positive. Matt Mason has examined modern piracy and the young punk capitalists who practice it in his book The Pirates Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, and cast it as a better successor to the system it is replacing: Over the past few decades in the West, we have entered a period of hyperindividualism.But the power of billions of connected individuals, now flexing more power than markets, governments using new ideas our economic model cannot yet comprehend, should be welcomed. Punk capitalists mix altruism with self-interest to compete on new levels the free market by itself cannot reach. (2008, p.240) This is not to say that we are already in a post-copyright age: these savvy young users need to learn about copyright, which makes it problematic that they are growing too jaded to tune in any longer to the messages they've been fed, namely, NO, NO NO. I created YES YOU CAN Use That Copyrighted Work! in part out of the belief that youth need a guide to Copyright that says YES.

RUNNING HEAD: YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work The Presentation and Website: YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work!

Presentation URL http://prezi.com/gofjxkdnr8m5/yes-you-can-use-that-copyrighted-work/ Website URL http://copyright-yes.weebly.com/index.html YES YOU CAN Use That Copyrighted Work! is comprised of a website to give the presentation context, and the presentation, which is a Prezi a presentation developed using the online Prezi application. The Prezi itself is best considered in terms of the tools it uses. What stands out most, judging from the reactions of viewers Ive spoken to, is the format: It is an interactive online presentations using an extensive amount of borrowed material. In particular it is a transformative re-employment of the heart of another Prezi, by Balzs Turai, which he designed to teach Prezi users how to employ animations in their Prezis. I believe my use of these animations is legal, but as intended it is a somewhat risky, vigorous exercise in the application of the fair use provision, showing young viewers by example that they dont always have to play it safe when reusing work. In terms of language, my intent was to reflect a positive outlook on copyright by using the word "Yes" and positive statements as much as possible. To make the text presentation aspects more interesting to young viewers, who are notorious for their boredom of print, the presentation is tone-driven, featuring two voices: that of the student (in thin mostly burgundy font); and the instructor (myself, in mostly gray font). The orange font has been used in both voices for emphasis and exclamations, as have other font colors. As the teacher I tried to be humorous, in particular poking fun at rights culture, as when the student hypothetically desires copyright protection, and the perspective broadens to suggest that s/he is as "enraged, gargantuan rodent" for wanting copyright protection.

RUNNING HEAD: YES YOU CAN Use that Copyrighted Work Prezis are ideal for looking at one issue via multiple perspectives, and the issue of

copyright benefits enormously from this feature. I used the closer perspective to focus on more rote education like rules and exceptions, including y y y y what copyright gives a creator the exclusive right to do what fair use allows what is not covered by copyright what creative commons offers

The broader perspective was employed second, to focus on the philosophy behind copyright, the idea that the viewer should have a say in it, and the notion that simply by reusing work, they are making a positive impact. In conclusion, reception has been mostly warm by those who have been shown YES YOU CAN Use That Copyrighted Work! These previewers have included fellow members of the class for which it was created, IRLS 584 at the University of Arizona; our instructor Kay Mathieson; my husband, an elementary-school teacher; and our nine-year-old son. For this presentation to be truly effective in changing the landscape of youth copyright education, it will need to be marketed to youth and youth educators, an activity I have considered for the future but am not doing at this time. I acknowledge that it falls short in explaining what copyright is in basic terms, and it therefore would be best presented paired in a classroom of younger students with a more basic explanation of copyright rules, perhaps including ALAs copyright tools. However, I am content to have the savvy young user who finds this presentation while surfing the web to consider it on its own. She has doubtless been exposed to so much about the basics of copyright, and in particular about what it doesnt allow her to do, that this presentation might compel her to

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see copyright notices in a new light, and view the concepts of intellectual property as open for her input, rather S.L.O.P. (Sound Like Old People) to ignore altogether.

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Works Cited

American Library Association. (2011) Copyright Tools. Retrieved December 8, 2011 from http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/copyright/crtools/index.cfm Animation library. (2011). Four animations used in presentation retrieved from http://www.animationlibrary.com Aoki, K., Boyle, J., Jenkins, J., & Duke University. (2006). Bound by law?: Tales from the public domain. Durham, N.C.: Duke [University] Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Youth and Media. Visited October 18, 2011 at http://youthandmedia.org/wiki/Main_Page FAE Kids subcommittee of The Copyright Society of the U.S.A. Copyright Kids! Visited October 18, 2011 at http://www.copyrightkids.org/ Hobbs, R. (2009). Yes, You Can Use Copyrighted Materials! Downloaded December 8, 2011 from http://www.slideshare.net/reneehobbs/yes-you-can-use-copyrighted-materials Please note the similarity in naming between Renee Hobbs' slideshow and my presentation and website is purely accidental; I created mine two years later than hers, but with no awareness of hers. Upon discovering her excellent slideshow on December 8, 2011, I chose to include it in the references for this paper. Joseph, L. C. (Updated April 18, 2011) Cyberbee interactive tool. Retrieved December 8, 2011 from http://www.cyberbee.com/cb_copyright.swf Library of Congress. (n.d.). Taking the mystery out of copyright. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/teachers/copyrightmystery/

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Mason, M. (2008). The pirate's dilemma: How youth culture reinvented capitalism. New York: Free Press. Downloaded on October 21, 2011 from http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book Palfrey, J., Gasser, U., Simun, M., & Barnes, R. F. (May 01, 2009). Youth, Creativity, and Copyright in the Digital Age. International Journal of Learning and Media, 1, 2, 79-97. Retrieved October 18, 2011 from http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3128762 Russell, C., Buttler, D. K., & American Library Association. (2004). Complete copyright: An everyday guide for librarians. Chicago: American Library Association. Samuels, E. B. (2000). The illustrated story of copyright. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. Somlai-Fischer, A. Lesson 1:Looping and zooming, for Prezi Academy. Retrieved November 15, 2011 from http://prezi.com/learn/looping-and-zooming/ Turai, Balzs. (30 March 2010.) Inserting Animations in Prezi. Multiple animations downloaded November 15, 2011 from http://prezi.com/learn/looping-and-zooming/ Vaidhyanathan, S. (2001). Copyrights and copywrongs: The rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. New York: New York University Press. Yar, M. (January 01, 2008). The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns: criminalization, moral pedagogy and capitalist property relations in the classroom. New Media & Society, 10, 4, 605-623.