Doing our Part for Copyright Awareness Week
Monday, March 10th, 2008 by Patrick Ross
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As you may have read, last week the Copyright Alliance wrote more than 150 educators and education associations directing them to the many different educational resources on copyright found in our For Educators section, with age targets including elementary school, middle school, high school and even college. There are also resources for parents. Why now? Because we're doing our part to support Copyright Awareness Week, sponsored annually in March by the Copyright Society. Watch this space for the rest of the week for special guest blogs related to our efforts.
On our About Us page, we describe ourselves as follows: "The Copyright Alliance is a non-profit, non-partisan educational organization
dedicated to the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs and growth." Those aren't just words. We are dedicated to education; as society becomes better informed about how copyright makes every one of our lives better every day, copyright will receive more respect from those making use of copyrighted works, and everyone will win. With all due respect to our colleagues at the Copyright Society, it is also an effort that takes more than one week a year. They understand that, however, and we at the Copyright Alliance are grateful they've sponsored this week to at least help gain a little bit of focus on the subject.
We will continue to add to and refresh our For Educators section, and are working on other ways to improve education in copyright that hopefully we will be able to discuss in more detail in the coming months. It is a positive message. It is a message of hope for creators and copyright owners. But it is also an upbeat message for every consumer, who sees daily more and more legal business models offering creative works with numerous rights offerings at varied prices, including free. These business models only work if copyright is respected. If works are taken at will in defiance of copyright, then we have chosen anarchy over chaos, and will have lost not just those creative business models, but much of the future creative works we otherwise could have enjoyed.
I don't think most consumers want that. In fact, recent analyses of Internet traffic involving such activities as infringing use of BitTorrent suggest that while such activity takes up at least half — if not more — of a typical ISP's bandwidth, it is only about 5% of the ISP's customers doing that massive infringement. A quick perusal of tech-friendly blogs would suggest everyone is infringing and infringing massively while spinning quite elaborate rationalizations for their behavior, but the vast majority of us are not infringing and are already beginning from a point of wanting to do right by creators and copyright owners. With just a bit more education, we can all see just how much copyright benefits each us as consumers, and ensure those infringers stay on the fringe.
Stay tuned this week for more from our guest bloggers.
