Week 5 - The Copyrights
There's a punk band that I'm a big fan of called The Copyrights, and they were the inspiration for the title of this post. Beyond having an appropriately fitting name for this week's topic, they remind me of the mantra "keep it simple." The Copyrights' brand of pop-punk is charmingly simple and mostly uncomplicated, and that's the attitude I maintain when dealing with copyrights at work doing instructional design.
Naturally, dealing with real copyrighted material is not so simple and uncomplicated. There are emails to write, permissions to ask for, citations to draft – it's a bit of a maze. There have been a few instances at my work where I've had to directly deal with asking for copyright permission.
The first time was for a project involving the Florida Department of State and the State House of Representatives Chamber. We were developing a project to digitize the historical murals that hang in the chamber and one of my jobs was asking permission from the Florida Historic Capitol Museum to use material from a book they published. In my correspondence with a museum representative, she informed me that getting full permission to use the captions from the book in our website would require coordination with some high ranking members of the Dept of State. She recommended using placeholders and attributing acknowledgments while we awaited permission. Long story short, the project never moved past the concept phase and I never needed to worry about the whole dance of acquiring permission.
Another time of dealing with copyrights was much simpler and uncomplicated, how I like. I found a great graphic on a years' old blog that I felt fit excellently in a course I was developing. My much more experienced colleague provided me with a email template she uses to ask for copyright permissions. I drafted an email, waited for a response, and never got one. At the end of the day we decided to just use the graphic and add an attribution caption! It was a simple call that saved a lot of time creating our own graphic. Sometimes it's better to not reinvent the wheel.
Dealing with copyright issues in instructional design is an important component of the job. While I always hope asking for permission is straightforward and uncomplicated, sometimes there are hoops to jump through just to get that perfect resource.
Hi Alex, over the years of working at FDLE, I've had my hands in almost every course in our system. Several years ago, I was asked to take over our "Taser" course and told "it needed some serious work." When I got in there, the first thing that needed immediate "fixing" was removing all language and images related to the word "taser." Taser™ is a dart firing stun gun or conducted electrical weapon made by Axon Enterprises who holds all rights to the name, images, etc. It was originally named after the inventor and called Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle. I did reach out to them and ask if we could use images and their name, but that was not an option. We (the general public) call it “getting tased” or “using a taser,” etc. which I don’t think will change, but our attorneys are much happier now that it is removed from our training programs.
ReplyDeleteWow that's fascinating! I had no idea Taser was an initialism. I can relate to the task of finding all the instances of a word or phrase and removing them – legalese changes so often that I don't even bat an eye. What's interesting about your situation and Taser is that the company, as you suggested, can't stop us from using Taser in common usage. It's easy for us to abide by attorney directives and remove words from a course but we can't tell people to stop using the word. Like Kleenex or Bandaids, some company labels just stick. It will be interesting to see how they react if the Oxford Dictionary ever puts "taser" in the dictionary.
Delete