The other day Jason Hardin, who is the manager of access services, came into our computer class to talk about copyright laws. I found his lecture quite informative and interesting. I particularly found his lecture to be interesting when he described that plagiarism is usually just a moral sin or an academic crime rather than a federal one. Copyright means government recognition of an intellectual property. That means that the government is actually protecting your work from being copied. He discussed that the moment a work is saved, published, or finished it is protected by the law, and is protected for the author's lifetime plus 70 years. I found out that Disney is the reason that this law has been passed by Congress. In order for them to retain ownership after Walt Disney's death, the Disney Corporation had to lobby Congress to increase the amount of years works can be copyrighted.
It was good to know all of this information, so that I can myself be knowledgeable of copyright laws if I was to ever make my own published work. I was a bit frustrated to hear that a big corporation manipulated lobbyists to control the law. Even though I am frustrated to hear that, I believe that the amount of time a work can be retained by the author should be much longer, since it is an original work, but Congress itself should pass it rather than a large corporation.
I think Joe Hardin did an excellent job on keeping the class engaged by making his lecture interactive allowing the class to ask questions through out his presentation as well as using clicker to quiz the class and feed them interesting topics.
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