That Boy Just Ain't (Copy)Right

"Stop asking me to commit Copyright Infringement!!"

"Hey, could you make this into a poster for me?  Thanks! :)
Attached:  BadlyCompressedTeacherMemeOfDubiousOrigin.jpg"

I average 2-3 such emails a week in my school, and with over 50 educators in the building, you can imagine the work piles up.  There's a certain temptation to just powering through the endless print orders- sometimes I just want to turn off my brain, fire up my poster maker, and get print whatever cruddy, badly artifact-laden images I've been sent, so that I can move on to more substantive work.

I don't, though.

My mother was a school librarian, and one of the big tips she gave me as I started my own career was to ALWAYS be careful of copyright.  Teachers, she said, are constantly overworked and often looking for a quick solution- and just as often undereducated on Copyright and Fair Use.  This was never an indictment of teachers, of course- just a simple acknowledgement of fact:  Teachers are always looking for useful resources, and don't always realize that those resources are not completely up-for-grabs just because they appeared on a Google results page.

Generally speaking, my approach thus far has been to attempt a recreation- if a teacher sends me a picture clearly pulled from Google, I often will use a program like Canva to remake the image, ensuring that the created resource is properly licensed.  This approach, however, is obviously very time consuming, and while I personally think my Canva skills are nothing to shake a battleaxe at, there are times where my recreations can't quite capture the vibe of the original piece.  In these cases, though, I don't tend to tell the teachers that their original requests are infringing- but this module has convinced me that maybe I aught to do so.

There are also times- as recently as last week, in fact- where teachers have straight-up asked me to rip and/or pirate movies, documentaries, or other videos for them to play in class; else I've been asked to secure access to Netflix for them (I wish...).  When this happens, I tend to be a bit more... instructive.  While no teacher is ever pleased to be told that their request violates Copyright, I usually soften the blow by suggesting a resource from either the Public Domain or from a Creative Commons Sharealike resource.  One of my go-to suggestions is the Georgia Public Broadcasting System (GPBS) website, which has a ton of free-to-use educational content for in-state teachers.  I've found, thus far, that the infringement requests I receive are more from not knowing where to look for free resources, as opposed to anything else.

While my district is fairly prescriptive about what resources we're allowed to use in the classrooms (for example, textbooks are both preselected and mandated as 1:1 for all students), supplemental materials like educational videos or infographics from OER sources are something that I should definitely share with my teachers.  I think, when our next PL day comes up, I'll see about putting together a brief "Copyright Primer" lesson, coupled with some useful resources for finding non-Copyrighted materials to use for their classroom needs.

Rather than just quietly stewing about the annoyance of being asked to commit an endless cavalcade of infringements, maybe it's better to actually work to educate my colleagues on how to discern for themselves what is, and is not, acceptable use.