Thing 9 - Copyright and Creative Commons

As I explored this thing I found that there were many misconceptions that I had about copyright. Being a band director you deal with copyright a lot. In the fall when we create our marching show we arrange our music and have to be sure we are in compliance with the copyrights of those pieces. For the rest of the year we perform sheet music which also deals with copyright. I thought that I had a pretty good idea of what was allowed, but after reading this material I was wrong. I put together a questionnaire and had the other band director that I work with take it to see what he knew. He was also very surprised at the correct answers. The thing that we both found the most interesting was the copying of student performances. We have always recorded the performances and then made copies of the performance for the students that brought in a CD. I now know that according to copyright I am not allowed to do this for our students.

We also explored creative commons during this thing and I made a creative commons license for my website.

With this license other educators will be able to use things that I have already created for there classes.