Rethinking copyright in the media age

After the controversy surrounding last year's proposed copyright bill C-61, which eventually died on the order table when Parliament was prorogued, the Federal government has decided to hold consultations across Canada before introducing a new version of the bill. While only time will tell how responsive the government will be to the public's submissions, the series of town halls and round tables is definitely a good start in making the process transparent and taking the views of a wide variety of Canadians into account. Below is an expanded version of MNet's submission to the Round Table held in Gatineau, Quebec on July 29th 2009.

Events, Intellectual Property, Internet & Mobile, Journalism & News, Media Production, Resources

Fair Dealing for Educators

To teach students to be media literate, they -- and their teachers -- need to be able to critically engage with media. That may seem obvious, but until last year teachers' ability to use media texts in the classroom was extremely limited by the Copyright Act.

Intellectual Property, Resources

With a little help from my friends

Third entry in a series looks at sites that help users create content. In the last instalment of this series we looked at some of examples of user-created media such as mashups, fan movies and machinima.

Internet & Mobile, Media Production, Resources, Video Games

My So-Called Life as Liz

If you are over twenty years old, you may not be aware of the show My Life as Liz, which is part of MTV's lineup that includes Jersey Shore and The Hills and recently began airing on MTV Canada. My Life as Liz stands out from those others shows for two reasons.

Resources, Television

Plagiarism is a media issue

It's nearly time to go back to school, and for teachers that means back to one of the profession's most frustrating tasks -- preventing, detecting and dealing with plagiarism. Plagiarism, academic and otherwise, is an old problem; Newton and Leibnitz accused each other of it, and Helen Keller was so shaken by an accusation of having stolen her story "The Frost King" that she turned from fiction to writing the autobiography for which she is remembered. Still, comparing today's lifting of information to the sort of plagiarism that took place as recently as ten years ago is like comparing home cassette taping to online file-sharing

Resources

Wikiwars

With all the recent attention focused on stories of teenagers charged with distributing child pornography for taking sexually suggestive pictures of themselves, jobs lost due to Facebook and MySpace entries, and libel suits over blog posts, people are justifiably concerned about the permanence of material posted to the Internet. Many a teacher or parent has had to carefully explain to children or teens that whatever they post online might be seen by people other than the intended audience, and might be out there for a very long time.

Cyberbullying, Internet & Mobile, Privacy, Professional Development, Resources

Watching the elections

Joe McGinniss’ book The Selling of the President had a shocking title for 1968, suggesting as it did that in the television age the presidency had become nothing more than another product to be packaged and sold. MediaSmarts’ resource, Watching the Elections (a lesson for Grades 8-12), shines a light on how the different aspects of an election – from the debates to political ads to the candidates themselves – are actually media products.

Events, Internet & Mobile, Journalism & News, Marketing & Consumerism, Resources, Television

Changing the World, Online and Off

The classic 1985 science fiction novel Ender's Game is one of several books of that period that foresaw both the advent of the Internet and its eventual importance in society. While certain aspects of its portrayal seem dated – in particular, it more resembles the text-based bulletin board systems of the time than today's graphic Web – one element stands out as being particularly prescient: the use of the Internet to allow youth to participate fully in society. While today's young people aren't using the Internet to take over the world, as the characters in the novel do, they are increasingly using it to change the world, and more and more teachers are using the Internet to bring civic engagement into the classroom.

Events, Internet & Mobile, Professional Development, Resources