Who Owns It?

While I was perusing the DOPA tools at the YALSA blog I noticed a post related to digital copyright which was pretty interesting. The post is called, Who Owns What? and it pertains to educating teens to content uploaded to the various social networking sites, sites like YouTube and MySpace for example. While this doesn't just pertain to teens, I think it's with this generation that the lines between what's acceptable and what's not start to fade...I got my own taste of how little teens understand of this issue at work myself, and to be honest with you, I don't blame them for not understanding...copyright is confusing, and it even contradicts itself. I think for this reason it's important for librarians to help all of our patrons understand, especially teens, and to promote education of copyright issues in our libraries.

YALSA also brings up a good point about teens as creative owners of content though:

You Tube, My Space, and other social networking sites terms of service aren't necessarily bad, (It really takes a lawyer to make complete sense out of them.) but it's important that teens know about the terms of service on the sites they use. And, don't forget, teens also need to know about Creative Commons and how to license the content that they create for sharing, mashing, and/or non-commercial (or commercial) use.

Many more kids are creating content online and I think these issues will start making more sense to them when they're on the other side of copyright. While I worry that many teens don't understand why it's important to protect intellectual property rights, I think that my worries could be premature. It could be that once teens are actively participating in the creation of this content it might actually click for them. It's really hard to say, but in the meantime I think librarians can certainly help them out as much as we can...and of course it's kind of hard to help kids participate in the creation of online content if the government decides to ban sites like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube from our computers...let's hope it doesn't get to that point either.

Tags: library, libraries, youtube, myspace, creative commons, copyright, intellectual property