Day 21: Digital Resources and Copyright

In chapters 7 and 12 in your Envision in Depth books, there is a healthy discussion of copyright issues.  You know by now that you can't just borrow someone else's work without asking for it or without citing them.  This is also true with digital works, but there are places where you can borrow images, sounds, and videos online.  You might want to use these freely available sources instead of going out and taking some pictures of your own with a camera; though I'd encourage you to do that too!

You can look for freely available works using Google, if you specify a labeled for reuse license in the advanced search.


You can also search at a site called CreativeCommons.org.  They're a great organization that has pursued creating special copyrights for digital materials since they're shared so much more freely.  Whatever you make, you automatically own, but some people may want to share their work with others.  Here's a fair overview.  But you may want to check out that site for images, audio, or whatnot for your alternate reality games.

Another good resource for free digital materials is Archive.org.  They have old movies and such, which is where I got the old Nazi footage and the educational audio for The Gradgrind Society video.  So, you may want to look there too.  Also, now, the Youtube.com/editor allows you to search for videos licensed under the Creative Commons attribution that you could remix into something new.  


Remix is a new culture of possibilities.  We remix all the time.  Even your essays remix other writers' ideas.  Heck, Disney is the worst for copyright protection--don't borrow their stuff--but they've remixed old ideas as well.  Hip Hop uses remix.  And viral videos remix memes that create funny, or interesting, or new ideas.  

Lawrence Lessig is famous for talking about remix and shared culture and has a book called  Free Culture that's really interesting.  Here he is at the TED conference (which stands for Technology, Education, and Design), where they get the best speakers from around the world to talk about really interesting ideas.  You can check out more talks at ted.com.









So, try to be creative with your projects and generate your own work, but borrow when you need to or when it makes sense.


Your Daily Assignment:


First and foremost, you should be working with your groups on your multimedia projects!  Time flies.  I hope you're enjoying this project.  I'm really looking forward to seeing what each group comes up with!


But also, I'd like each of you to post a video on your blogs describing your writing process.  You can use iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker, or just the Youtube editor and webcam capture.  Most people then host their videos on youtube.com or vimeo.com and post the links or embed them into their blogs.  It doesn't have to be long; 30 seconds is fine.  I'd just like each of you to think about what your writing process was like and compare it to something else.  I'll actually give you a few days to finish this since technology can be a little tricky, so have it posted by anytime on Monday.  This gives everybody in the class a chance to at least play with video.  Here are a couple examples you can see here, here, and here.