Authorship, Copyright, Open Access

How do issues such as authorship, copyright, and open access impact your desire, ability and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?

Prior to this course, I never (intentionally) published online, unless you consider Facebook posts publishing, so I haven’t considered the issues of authorship and copyright in regards to my own work.  Through the years, I’ve “borrowed” assignments I’ve found through Google searches for specific language arts units.  I borrowed from a teacher in Illinois so often that I sent him a thank you email  telling him how much I appreciated the effort he put into his units and just how lucky his students were to have him for an instructor.  Now I see some of his work on Read, Write, Think, so maybe he’s getting remunerated for his efforts.  (I’ve also learned that sometimes my students are borrowing from the same people.)  Likewise, I’ve seen a fellow teacher passing along a mash-up of an assignment I’ve created in my classroom, and I won’t recall giving that teacher the use of my assignment.  That’s mildly annoying.  So if I was making a living researching and authoring journal articles or writing a book, I would consider copyright important.  Although I appreciate the spirit of the Linux creation and Clay Shirky’s,   “Join us, and we will invent Cheesy Poofs together,” Creative Commons seems a good compromise to protect the creation/collaboration of produsage when the originator wants to maintain some control.

In reference to the Lingel article, it’s interesting that, contrary to the reality of the law, the people video recording concerts and posting them on YouTube believed that they owned the content of their videos.

So I suppose it depends on whether or not someone is producing or just using—the proverbial two-headed coin.