DS106: PLATFORM FOR CREATIVE EXPRESSION
After exploring DS106 website, I think it’s a great platform that allows people to be creative and inventive while freely sharing their new type of art with internet community.
Intellectual property. With the emergence of the Internet people start to rethink and change the ways intellectual property should be used in a modern inter-connected society. Members of the DS106 community do their best to recognize the rights of the owners of intellectual property such as images, video, music and other digital content. However, they feel that they have the right to create new media by using elements of intellectual property and this makes important additions to original contributions.
Fair use. Allows to maintain a balance between the free flow of information over the Internet while still protecting intellectual property rights. It is a shared opinion among the members of the ds106 community that the role of fair use is to prevent copyright from limiting the creativity, and from imposing other challenges that would prevent the creation and spread of knowledge and learning. Since DS106 is online teaching and learning site, it permits limited use of copyrighted material.
Network ethics. Everyday technologies like the Internet, and digital media affects how we work, play and communicate, and challenges us to think about ethical problems in new ways. Few users of DS106 site would argue that legal downloading and distributing copies of copyright-protected material is stealing, and thus ethically wrong. However, using pieces of others’ digital work like mash-up and remix allows for the emergence of new forms of creativity.
Commons. After browsing through DS106 site, I came to realize that site users understand Commons as being able to collaborate, explore, share, mix and re-use digital content in new creative ways.
Thanks, Tatsiana, for your thoughtful post. You mention that the contributors to the DS106 class use “pieces of others’ digital work,” and this is permitted given that this is an online teaching and learning site. You are correct that the purpose of using copyrighted materials is an important factor in whether a fair use exception applies, but in this case how do they know that all viewers of DS106 are there for teaching and learning purposes? What other factors are involved in evaluated a reproduced work of art to determine whether a fair use claim is applicable? Do the mashups on DS106 qualify based on those factors?
Also, I think you have a typo in the following sentence, which changes the meaning drastically: “Few users of DS106 site would argue that illegal downloading and distributing copies of copyright-protected material is stealing, and thus ethically wrong.”