The Premier of NSW is currently (early 2015) in an election campaign and it appears that someone in his office thought it would be a good idea to join in the "Mean Tweets" meme. The video of the Premier reading mean tweets about himself was produced and placed onto YouTube. But you won't find it on YouTube as he reports on Twitter.

Mean tweets video removed. Working with YouTube and Warner to resolve. Fact: everybody hurts, sometimes.

— Mike Baird (@mikebairdMP) February 26, 2015

What isn't explicitly mentioned in this tweet is that the video was removed because of copyright infringement. The video made use of popular songs as a backing track. The problem is that they had not asked for permission to use those songs in their video.

This story from the ABC goes onto explain in more detail.

Looking at the Premier's tweet will illustrate the problems that this can bring. Just read the replies to his tweet.

Have you noticed the images I place on the Study Desk each week? Such as the one to the right?

Not my image

These are not my images. I didn't create them. In fact, they were created and shared as part of an educational technology course at a Canadian university. If you click on the image you can see the photo as part of the collection of photos for that course.

Did I ask for permission?

Yes, I did.

Do you see the caption under the image? Click on the image, you'll be taken to the original. This is evidence that I have "asked" for permission to reuse this photo.

Knowledge of how to ask for permission and why you need to ask permission is linked to the ICT general capability and also to ideas of digital literacy and digital citizenship.

Digital citizenship

Digital Citizenship is a phrase that is becoming increasingly better known. It is a topic that we will revisit later in the semester. Wikipedia offer this definition

A digital citizen commonly refers to a person utilizing information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.

This blog provides the following short definition of digital citizenship

digital citizenship means the ability to use technology safely, responsibly, critically, and pro-actively to contribute to society.

Too often Digital Citizenship is equated solely with safety and avoiding cyber-bullying or similar. It is in fact, much more than this. But more on that later in the semester.

Digital Citizenship and the ICT general capability

Hopefully you can see the connection between the definition of Digital Citizenship above and the following quote from the Australian Curriculum's ICT capability

To participate in a knowledge-based economy and to be empowered within a technologically sophisticated society now and into the future, students need the knowledge, skills and confidence to make ICT work for them at school, at home, at work and in their communities.

Level 5 of the learning continuum for the ICT general capability includes:

Recognise intellectual property
apply practices that comply with legal obligations regarding the ownership and use of digital products resources

Beyond teaching our students to become digital citizens. It's incumbent upon us to be effective practitioners of Digital Citizenship.

Professional standards for teachers

As it happens, this also connects with AITSL Professional Teachers standard 4.5

4.5. Use ICT safely, responsibly and ethically Demonstrate an understanding of the relevant issues and the strategies available to support the safe, responsible and ethical use of ICT in learning and teaching.

If you have used an image found via Google images in a previous assignment, then you may not actually be breaking the law. Australian copyright law has a fair dealing provision for students doing assignments. However, for assignment 1 we are going to apply a stricter set of requirements for the following reasons:

1. You need to demonstrate your understanding of the constraints that non-students must face. You need to demonstrate your ability to act as a digital citizen and awareness of the law.
2. Your assignment will be a public online artefact. It's not something that only I or the markers see.

   Uploading something to a public website lays outside the fair dealing provision.

This page from Sydney University provides some more detail on Australian copyright law and how it applies to you as a student.

Anyone who creates a resource automatically receives copyright ownership of that resource. Put another way, every resource has some form of copyright on it. For example, you have copyright ownership of all of the blog posts you author.

How do you identify what the copyright status of a resource is?

Finding it can be hard

One of the issues is that it's not always common for people or organisations to clearly specify what licence they've applied to their work. By default normal copyright applies.

Discovering what a copyright owner's perspective on reuse often requires trawling through the web pages and sites they've produced. It can sometimes be found in an "about" page or similar. But it is rare.

Have you licensed your blog posts?

If you visit my blog and look at the bottom of the right-hand column, you should see a Creative Commons license. I've made the decision to adopt this license.

This page explains how this was done.

By default, assume copyright

If you can't find any explicit mention of a licence, then you must assume traditional copyright applies. In Australia that means you can only make use of someone else's videos, photos etc if they give you permission to do so or your use fits under fair dealing.

For the purposes of your artefact, fair dealing doesn't apply as your artefact is on the public web.

One way to find digital resources you can use is to find those that have a Creative Commons licence. This is a licence that explicitly allows you to use the resource (with some conditions) without having to ask for permission.

Doing this involves two simple steps:

1. Find resources with a Creative Commons licence.

   One good way is to use the Creative Commons search.

2. Attribute the resource appropriately.

   For many resources licenced with Creative Commons, you simply can't just use the resource. You have to attribute the resource appropriately.

The following provides examples of how to do this.

ImageCodr

This blog post from a Melbourne teacher librarian talks about ImageCodr a browser extension and website can be used to attribute images with Creative Commons licenses.

ImagCodr only works if you are able to insert HTML. i.e. you won't be able to do this with a Powerpoint or Prezi presentation. In these other situations, you will need to download the image onto your computer, import it into the program you're using and manually enter the attribution information. This PDF from Creative Commons Australia summarises how to attribute Creative Commons material (i.e. how to manually do what ImageCodr does).

A video example

The following 7 minute video shows how I use the Creative Commons search and ImageCodr to find and reference images.

Using creative commons from David Jones on Vimeo.

Visual and HTML mode

The following video shows how to copy and paste the HTML code provides by ImagCodr into a Wordpress blog. It illustrates a more general process of copying and pasting HTML code into the standard editors used on most websites. e.g. an approach similar to this will work on discussion forum posts in the Study Desk.

Visual and HTML mode on Wordpress from David Jones on Vimeo.

If you wish to use music in a web-based artefact, then essentially the same recipe applies:

1. You normally just can't use any old music you wish.
2. You need to ask permission for most music unless it's explicitly shared.
3. You should aim to use music licensed using Creative Commons or some other means that allows re-use.

Additional resources

Some outside resources that expand upon this include:

• Avoid copyright and use royalty free music for video production expands a bit on the above and provides links to a range of sites that provide royalty-free music.
• A post focused more on personal use of music, covers similar ground.
• Free Music Archive one site that provides access to a collection of music you can use.

If a YouTube video includes an option to Share and in particular an option to Embed the video, then you can typically use it in a public website.

The assumption is that by allowing this option to be available, the provider of the video is giving you permission to embed it. To use it.

Attribution

The embed code provided by YouTube contains appropriate attribution. There's no need for any additional attribution.

Check it was uploaded by the copyright holder

Imagine that you've just found on YouTube a copy of the first episode from the next series of Game of Thrones. Even better, it has the share option enabled so you can embed the video in your blog or web page.

Should you embed this video?

Do you think the person who uploaded the video to YouTube was the copyright owner?

A popular show like Game of Thrones would never post the first episode of a new series onto YouTube before the series aired on television. This suggests that the person who uploaded the video was not the copyright holder for the video. Hence, they don't have permission to upload it or to give you permission to use it.

If it's likely that the uploader of the video is the copyright holder, don't embed the YouTube video.

Whether embedding the video is against the law is difficult to answer, but embedding the video is certainly questionable.

A number of people have used images in their blog posts. It appears likely that quite a few of them have not asked for permission appropriately.

If you're one of these people, you:

1. won't lose marks on your blog;

   The rubric for the learning journal only counts number of blog posts, average word count, and number of links. It doesn't look any further.

2. should look at fixing the images; and,

   In many cases there will not be any negative ramifications for using photos for which you haven't asked permission. However, as your blog is a public record of your actions. You do need to demonstrate your ability against Professional Teachers standard 4.5.

   Fixing your blog posts to demonstrate appropriate use of images would provide a good demonstration of this.

3. perhaps think about writing a blog post about this.

   Such a blog post would be a useful piece of evidence for your professional portfolio against standard 4.5.