[Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash]

Listening to the video lecture entitled Is Copyright a Little Fuzzy? A Guide to Copyright by a Copyright Manager and Librarian at Royal Roads University, Melanie Wrotel (2018), got me thinking about the blurring lines within the domain of copyright laws in the digital age.

Nowadays, in the context of information overflow, many students have an expectation of having instant access to information sources. Furthermore, since the digital information is so easily transferrable and manipulated, often the students might not respect or even be aware of the copyright laws when it comes to digital sources.

The Google generation, according to Rowlands et al. (2008) prefers to use search engines, since it “fits college students’ life styles (sic.) better than physical or online libraries and that fit is ‘almost perfect'” (p. 293). This study has demonstrated that students exhibit such behaviours as “horizontal information seeking” (looking for content across multiple platforms for short period of time), “squirreling” (getting to resource just to download content), and “power browse” (quick overview instead of deep reading). The study has also confirmed my observations that students “do not respect intellectual property” and feel that copyright rules are “unfair and unjust” (Rowlands et al., 2008, p. 301).  This presents an important issue in Higher Education and calls for an increase in copyright education opportunities, especially to the younger students population.

It was also interesting that in her presentation Melanie Wrotel considers academic blogging a “higher risk level” activity (Wrotel, 2018, 34:16) when it concerns possible copyright violations. As students, even though we perceive this activity as educational in nature, opening our content to the web, means we have to carefully consider all the possible copyright violations, especially with regards to sharing larger parts of the texts. This is also important for the images and other media we use online.

In conclusion, education of students on copyright in academia is crucial. Understanding students’ views on copyright in the digital age is important since it can guide the educational approaches and address potential issues. The presentation by Melanie Wrotel was an extremely important and informative part of our program, and it is my hope that other institutions would adopt the same approach.

References:

Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Williams, P., Huntington, P., Fieldhouse, M., Gunter, B., … & Tenopir, C. (2008). The Google generation: the information behaviour of the researcher of the future. In Aslib proceedings (Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 290-310). Retrieved from https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/00012530810887953/full/html

Wrobel, M. (2018). Is copyright a little fuzzy? A guide to copyright. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://moodle.royalroads.ca/moodle/mod/page/view.php?id=347413