As a TOSA (Teacher on Special Assignment) I'm always on the lookout for ways to make teacher's lives easier. A couple of weeks ago I found this little application called Tooble. Tooble was designed by high school kids in Connecticut for YouTube users to be able to download videos directly to their computers. That brings up my "future" discussion: copyright laws. If you've spent any time on YouTube you have been assailed by edited movies, music, news broadcasts, and a plethora of copyrighted material mishmashed together. Now that we can download those videos down to our computers and further edit them and then repost them to the Internet where does it end? As a former computer teacher, I told my students that they could create these collage projects for my classes, but that I could not post them on the Internet because that would constitute "publishing". Now the line is even more blurry.
Check out this video from TED entitled: "How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law". The video discusses old laws that originally gave property owners the rights to the sky above their land, and once airplanes started violating those laws they had to be rewritten. It seems that through new technology we've transversed into another new dimension and now our laws need to play catch up. I'm very interested to see where those laws will take us. Thoughts?
