John Johnston, teacher-blogger extraordinaire, made an interesting comment on my post pointing to Judy O’Connell’s helpful links to copyright-free images:
“It is a really interesting experience trying to explain to 10 year olds the concept of sharing and only using pictures with permission. Especially ones who think pirate is a kind of early release DVD 
I try to get my bloggers to attribute cc images or ones released for edu. They find it difficult to find the license details on say wikipedia, I hope their I \“got this picture from wikipedia\” will been seen as being in the spirit of attribution if not legally correct.
Unfortunately there are still a lot of teachers who think Google Images is an appropriate source of images.”
Has anyone tried any interesting ways of explaining the concept of copyright, and its responsibilities, to young children?
A good question; looking on the web, most resources aimed at ‘copyright for kids’ were pretty black and white with a don’t do this message followed by varied scenarios of what might or might not happen to you.
As it stands, even for us grown-ups, copyright and IP can be pretty complex issue. I think the key things to get across to kids are the need to check, ownership, (help them find this) and where appropriate seek permission from rights holders. In recent workshops I have done, kids have thoroughly enjoyed the activity of seeking permission; (equals: literacy, communication and ‘real world’ experience). But this did raise the hackles of some of the teachers (raised on Google images) who thought it was too much trouble/hard work and distracted from the ‘curriculum. They wanted easy fixes and quick solutions. My argument is that if it is worth having then you need to take the time and trouble.
So to try and answer your question; a good place to start would be explaining the © symbol and the alternatives offered by of the CC licenses,( perhaps showing this clip).
I would do a Flickr based activity because each licence is clearly explained , (including ©) very clearly. Perhaps a good exercise would be to do a Flickr CC search, check which license is attached to that image, then ask the kids to produce some work using that image within the parameters of the image — result — you get a good discussion and some real creative work showing what is possible in each category. I think we need to change the emphasis from the restrictive to the productive. Adjust for age as appropriate
Excellent, Theo! Creative Commons itself might be a useful source of learning here for kids (and teachers!).
This, as you can imagine, comes up quite frequently in Music. An example might be someone not having bought the advised book and saying, “why can’t you just copy it for us?” The most straightforward and convincing reply is something like the following:
Imagine you were writing a guitar book. This was your job. Everyone else was going out to work but you were staying at home to make your book really good — working on the music, the words and the drawings. People would come home with the money they’d earned, but you wouldn’t worry because you were going to get yours later — once the book was ready for sale. But, hardly any money appeared because somebody was giving away free copies of the book to all his pupils. How pleased would you be about that?
a little off topic but I thought you might find it interesting
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007–11-06-freereading_N.htm
Very interesting idea, Dave — thanks for the link!
I’ve approached this with a class of adult learners by asking what kind of things they might want to be able to control about their work.
They usually come up with the main points without too much prompting. “I want people to know it’s mine after I’ve put all that work in” , “I want to be able to sell it”, “I don’t want it to be misused to make me look bad”
This leads into a discussion of the POINT of copyright, and helps prevent them seeing it just as an annoyance to be overcome.
Hello John
Just mentioned this post in a recent one of mine. I especially liked Theo’s response. Are you aware of anyone else doing this kind of lesson?