Bars

So what do all of those sound effects mean? That is actually what can really happen if you break a law. How many of us break laws? With downloading: enough.
There is something called Copyright Laws. What are these? Well the copyright law helps protect ownership of material to the author of said material. It can be an essay, a picture, a book, a song, etc.. Why do these exist? Well frankly it is not fair or morally correct to take someone’s knowledge and hard work and pass it as your own because you want fame or just simply to make life easier. Believe it or not this is stealing and stealing is a crime. Which leads me to the police siren and the jail thing and yadda, yadda, yadda.

“But teacher!!! I put it in my own words, it’s not stealing!!!!” You are WRONG sir! Stealing copyrighted material, like a dissertation, an essay or any other kind of material is considered Plagiarism. This can easily be avoided by citing the work. Letting know where you got that information be it in the concrete text or in a footnote. There is a website for awareness for plagiarism: Plagiarism.org. For a simpler view of what plagiarism is you can go to Common Crafts and check out their video on Plagiarism, which is quite interesting and informative if I might add.

“But but but… what if I want to use that copyrighted picture?”

“But but but… what if I want to use that (insert desired piece of copyrighted material here)”
AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by Kevin Lawver

Well unfortunately you’re going to have to ask the author for permission. But here’s the thing. Some authors need to find a way to share their work but once you post something on the internet it is doomed to forever be public because the internet is like a public pool: Everyone can use it. Then next thing they know someone stole their work, it’s under their name and since it’s a copy it’ll be nearly impossible to prove that work is theirs.

Well seeing this problem the superheroes of the day walked in:

Creative Commons Logo
Attribution Some rights reserved by jorgeandresem

Creative Commons is a revolutionary website that apparently asked the same question that sad little kid asked a few lines back. They thought there had to be an easier way to share copyrighted work legally so they used copyright licenses (perfectly legal) in which they owner of said material can agree on sharing their work, still copyrighted, with a few conditions. For an animated easy to view version of this you can watch this video!

Well I hope you all enjoyed my advice on how not to go to prison for copyright infringement. If you go to prison for any other reason well that your problem. Hope you learned soemthign and stay tuned for more posts.

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