Nowadays anyone can become a content curator, but not everyone can do it ethically and legally. Digital archiving is different from traditional archiving, traditional archiving was used to preserve physical object while digital archiving is used to preserve information no matter how the information is stored. Lawrence Lessig is the author of the book “Free Culture” he argues that the laws that were put in place in in the early 20th century were not adequate enough for that time and are still in use today making them even more out dated. On the topic of Free Culture Lessig is not calling for all copyrights to be lifted rather he is calling for less patents and copyrights, because the people that have the copyrights have all the money and they are restricting the creative capabilities of today’s creators. Where this whole conversation first started was mainly with music and sampling. We got to see how the whole conversation started in the film that we watched in class called “Copyright Criminals”. I found this film very interesting because it gave us both sides of the copyright dilemma. We got to see a spectrum of different views on how content should be used. Obviously the people that created the original content want their credit for what they made, while the people that are using the content are arguing that you cant tell what they original content is so why does it matter?
How to Curate Content Legally:
- First, you want to check the copyright on the information and see what permissions are available for the content that you want to use. For example, there are different types of copy rights:
- GNU Copyright is a general public license for software and other types of works, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users.
- Creative Commons is another type of copyright, CC provides free licenses to use copyrighted works whose author has allowed some public use. As an author, you can use CC to change your works from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved” and allow others to have use of your works.
- Another example of a type of copyright is Public Domain. Public domain is the term that refers to works that are not eligible for copyright or for which copyright protection is no longer available. Anyone wishing to use, reproduce or distribute a work in the public domain may do so without needing to seek permission from the owner.
2. Go to an original source when ever possible
- Oftentimes, especially when people are referencing other peoples’ sayings and inspiration, things get misattributed. To do this, always click on the links to original articles that you found in your source.
3. always give the author credit
- if you are confused on whether you can use the content always give the author credit so do not get a copyright infringement.
- most of the ideas that we have are not original ideas but a mix of ideas that we use to form our own opinions.
4. share your content with others, and if possible the original authors
- what is the point of curating if no one knows about it, make sure you if possible to send it to the original creator so you can make sure that the information present is accurate.
This video is about how to curate for education.
Caden Snyder DTC Blog 