April 27, 2007
"Universally Underinformed and Misinformed"
That is how a new study of student users (courtesy of the Wired Campus blog) of social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook characterizes its participants' understanding of copyright law. For example:
[while] 76% of the students said that the Fair Use doctrine allowed them to use copyrighted material, none could accurately define the doctrine. While they were generally concerned with staying on the "good side" of the law, they were "making up rules themselves" about what and how to use intellectual property. They also did not understand their own rights as creators of content.
In a world in which user-created content and social networking sites are among the innovations shaping our discussion of the future of higher education, it is clear that copyright education is a critical arena in which information literacy instruction, information technology training, and scholarly communications instruction come together.
At UIUC, our Scholarly Communications Program provides resources to faculty on how to manage their copyrights and how to support emerging models for dissemination and preservation of scholarly materials, and supports the ARL copyright education initiative. We are also beginning a dialogue with the Graduate College about how to integrate copyright education into the ongoing instructional programs provided through Central Reference to our graduate students.
In the Web 2.0 world, we all need to manage "author's rights" and navigate the shoals of "fair use." With strong leadership both in instruction and in scholarly communications, we are in a good position to work with our colleagues across campus to help all our users do just that.
Posted by swalter at April 27, 2007 2:16 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/mt-tb.cgi/94
