Realization #2: “Copyfight”

In Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, he argues that recent changes in copyright law have shifted us from a free (as in freedom) culture to a permission culture. One of the ramifications of this shift is that the perspective of capital shapes the way we think about knowledge (particularly in the context of the internet). As individual users now must concern themselves with copyright law and Digital Rights Management, our understanding of who owns what has evolved significantly.

For instructors interested in engaging with the new digital age (electracy), it's worth considering perspectives that do not always start from the position of capital – what's mine is mine and you can't have it. Because all texts, even those with little or no commercial value, come under copyright automatically, it behooves us to think with our students about whether such laws are a good thing, and what we might do about it.

In working on the Sharing Cultures Project, we have also become more aware of the ways that our ideas started to blend, that we would not, following months and months of online and teleconferencing exchange, be able tell where each idea originated. We could tell (as we make clear later in this thread of ideas) who was working in what way to make what changes, but we could not tell where each idea found its origin. And, we didn’t spend any time working to trace the idea back to its source. In essence, we have come to see ourselves as a Sharing Cultures Project Team – a group of people that, regardless of initial understandings, works to find common ground and negotiate meaning for the good of the whole, rather than for the benefit of the individual. We all have a “right” to the “copy” that is the Sharing Cultures Project and we hope to pursue pedagogical logic and technological perspective that encourages the perspective that we probably don’t actually “own” any ideas anyway.