Very short introduction to copyright law

Here’s my part of our EDU533W group presentation on copyright issues as they relate to teachers. My part started out as history and background. Then I realized only nerds would care about the history part. The slidecast below is a very short summary of current copyright law in the US. For the nerds out there, you can download a short PDF with more details here.

Web 2.0 redux, copyright law, and awesome presentation

Lawrence Lessig's talk, How creativity is being strangled by the law, at this year's TED conference was recently posted. A few things I wanted to note.

• Lessig touches on what we've been discussing about Web 2.0 and more generally, the current state of technology; that it's been easier and cheaper for people, unskilled and untrained, to be creators and participants of culture as opposed to only being consumers
• That current copyright law hasn't acknowledged this (I'm setting the stage for our micro-teach project, Tonia)
• And Lessig's presentation style rocks. Notice the sparsity of text on his slides and the simplicity of his graphics. No distractions. Everything he uses emphasizes his points. The slides aren't the focus, his ideas are. The slides simply compliment them. This is a style I've tried to model my own presentations after.