Lab 5: Copyrights
Brian wants to reintegrate this as a new lab one day (maybe an optional lab). --MF, 5/31/20
Software patents are controversial. In the US, software was generally not patentable until a 1981 Supreme Court decision. Students explore what it means to invent something, and why software might or might not be considered differently from machinery. The simultaneous invention of the telephone by several people is used as an example to debunk the apple-on-head, flash-of-insight myth.
The digital storage of information makes the marginal cost of a perfect copy zero. In principle, that shouldn't affect the rights of artists, but in practice, many people feel free to copy media both for their own use and to give to friends. When classes are polled on this topic, most or all hands go up for both "who thinks it's wrong to pirate music or movies" and for "who has pirated music or movies?" This is a springboard into a class discussion of how laws have changed, how artists should be supported, and the use of encryption to enforce copyright.
It's really important to understand that what's called "copyright" is not a right, like freedom of speech, or even like owning your house. On page 3 of this lab, students read the relevant paragraph from the US Constitution. which makes it clear that copyright has a limited duration, after which the work is supposed to enter the public domain, free for everyone to use. For this reason, we bend over backward not to use the tendentious term "intellectual property," which suggests a property right. like the right to keep your house or your car.
It's also really important not to turn this topic into a hectoring of students. "Stop downloading movies illegally!" We want students to feel empowered as moral agents, not just empowered as programmers.
Pacing
The 5 lab pages could be split across 2–3 days (
50–100 minutes). Expected times to complete follow:
Prepare
- You might ask students to look into news for current articles on copyrights.
- Although students are not directly assigned this reading, you might read Chapter 6 of Blown to Bits. In particular, "Automated Crimes-Automated Justice" (pages 195-199) is about the music industry's tactic of filing lawsuits against individuals for piracy. "Forbidden Technology" (pages 213-218) addresses the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
- These pages have a lot of reading. Depending on your class, you might create groups, assign each group a page to study and discuss, and then have a second day for reporting to the whole class, or you might do more in depth work on each page. Note: Pages 1 and 2 are background information to inform the deeper discussion on pages 3 and 4.
Lab Pages
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Page 1: Copyright.
- Learning Goal: Consider students' own beliefs and behaviors regarding copyright.
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Tips:
- Be careful about the language you use. Words like "pirate" prejudge the issues; point out to the class that advocates for both sides of controversial issues try to set the terms for the debate. In particular in BJC, we avoid the term "intellectual property," which makes an analogy to real property and, as explained on page 3 (The Social Bargain), distorts the original purpose of copyrights.
- An additional or alternative curriculum resource is Teaching Copyright, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
- Your students may find some of these topics particularly compelling. Depending on the style and interests of your classroom, these might be approached as discussions, formal debates, or a short written position statement. Deliberately supporting opposing positions can help a class see that the issues are complex.
- Here are two prompts for class discussion or a writing assignment: (1) Do you think everyone who illegally downloads music or movies deserves to be prosecuted? (2) If downloads are free, how should artists be supported? The first of these narrows the discussion by presupposing that copyrights are rights, and the only question is about enforcement. The second asks students to imagine a different world, and is open-ended.
- For example, if your students can't think of a way to support artists, here's a suggestion about music from Richard Stallman: Make free downloads legal, but require that every device that plays music have a button with a dollar sign on it, and if the user voluntarily pushes the button, one dollar is transferred from the user's bank account to the musicians' accounts. If you really like the song, you can push the button more than once, but there is no pressure to push it at all. This sounds like a precarious way to support musicians, but as it turns out, only the most popular of musicians actually make money from music sales; the publishers (record labels) have creative accounting practices that produce no net profit on sales. If just one person pushes the button, that's more money than the musician would make from sales.
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Page 2: Fair Use.
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Learning Goals:
- Learn about the situations in which use or republication of copyrighted material is legal.
- Consider how the protection of ideas might also limit as well as promote creativity.
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Tips:
- The EFF curriculum cited above has a lesson on fair use with specific real-life and fictional case studies.
- You can legally reproduce and hand out current Computers in the News articles in class, but you can't legally hand out copies of a news article that you've built into your curriculum to use every year.
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Page 3: The Social Bargain.
- Learning Goal: Understand the purpose of copyrights: to ensure that the copyrighted works eventually enter the public domain, free for anyone to use.
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Tips:
- This discussion of the social bargain is at the heart of understanding the issues regarding copyrights and patents. The text from the US Constitution makes the bargain clear both by explaining the purpose of copyrights and patents ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts") and the limited term that is crucial to achieving that purpose. This is the standard by which all issues in this area should be judged. (The actual text is, of course, US-specific, but the same principle is found in other countries' legal traditions also.)
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Page 4: Copyrights and Computers.
- Learning Goal: Consider the impact of technology on issues of copyright.
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Tips:
- This is the first time computer-specific copyright issues appear. The fact that computers can make perfect copies at zero marginal cost has destroyed what were previously important "natural" protections for copyright holders and has made individual movie and music fans significant threats to them. The widely-hated Digital Rights Management software can be understood as a response to this threat, not merely as a power grab (although it's that too). "Marginal cost" is an unfamiliar term to students, but the idea is easy: it costs a lot of money to produce a movie or a song recording in the first place, but it costs nothing to make one more copy.
- Note that, at least for sound recordings, the marginal cost has always been low. It's been estimated that the manufacturing cost for one CD is about three cents. But that's true only if you own a CD factory; burning a CD on your home computer costs more than that (for the blank CD). What's new is that anyone can reproduce a recording at no cost and distribute it over the Internet at zero marginal cost. (You pay for Internet access, but generally not for each individual transmission.)
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Page 5: Software as Copyright Enforcement.
- Learning Goal: Consider some of the software methods of copyright enforcement, including Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
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Tips:
- The DMCA is specifically mentioned in the CSP Framework, and students are to understand that it has been both "a benefit and a challenge" (EK 7.3.1P); consider assigning a web search to find its alleged benefits.
Solutions
There are no exercises for which solutions would be needed.
Correlation with 2020 AP CS Principles Framework
Essential Knowledge:
- IOC-1.F.1: Material created on a computer is the intellectual property of the creator or an organization.
- IOC-1.F.2: Ease of access and distribution of digitized information raises intellectual property concerns regarding ownership, value, and use.
- IOC-1.F.3: Measures should be taken to safeguard intellectual property.
- IOC-1.F.4: The use of material created by someone else without permission and presented as one's own is plagiarism and may have legal consequences.
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IOC-1.F.5: Some examples of legal ways to use materials created by someone else include:
- Creative Commons—a public copyright license that enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. This is used when the content creator wants to give others the right to share, use, and build upon the work they have created.
- open source—programs that are made freely available and may be redistributed and modified
- open access—online research output free of any and all restrictions on access and free of many restrictions on use, such as copyright or license restrictions
- IOC-1.F.6: The use of material created by someone other than you should always be cited.
- IOC-1.F.7: Creative commons, open source, and open access have enabled broad access to digital information.
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IOC-1.F.11: Computing innovations can raise legal and ethical concerns. Some examples of these include:
- the development of software that allows access to digital media downloads and streaming