Gabriela:
No. Not anything. That’s just weird.
Q:
Even your artistic photos?
Gabriela:
Yeah. Even those. Because I know a lot of people on Tumblr, they copy a photo then they claim it’s theirs. So I’m always worried about that.
Not only was Gabriela afraid of someone stealing her photos, she also expressed a belief that sharing her photos was “just weird,” a point to which I will return.
As a final example, I return to Javier, whom you were introduced to at the beginning of this chapter. Javier was an inspiring filmmaker who admitted to staying up much too late watching foreign films on YouTube and Vimeo. He enjoyed watching amateur films because he felt they introduced him to unique cinematography techniques and because they were also low-budget, as his own projects were. However, like Selena and Gabriela, Javier had never put his films on YouTube or Vimeo, despite the fact that he valued those sites as spaces for learning and sharing.
Javier:
I don’t put [my films] on YouTube.
Q:
How come?
Javier:
I don’t know. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like it but I haven’t tried to put them—I don’t know. It’s not, like, something that I really want to do to put my videos on YouTube. Now it’s so easy to steal ideas, so that’s why I haven’t put them.
Q:
Do you worry about someone stealing an idea from YouTube?
Javier:
Yeah … [that someone could] take them, make them yours … . Yeah, I don’t want people to—because it’s really easy to steal ideas.
Similar fears that someone might steal their ideas were articulated by many other students.
Pointedly, public conversations about young people and copyright tend to focus on issues of piracy—that is, fears and concerns that young people are stealing copyrighted materials. The common assumption is that young people are the people most likely to steal someone’s content or ideas. Cautionary tales of teens’ stealing content or ideas seem to have abated in recent years (in part because affordable and accessible copyright-friendly online models such as iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify have become popular), but there nonetheless remains a lot of concern about how teens’ media practices might infringe upon copyright laws. Readers may remember that the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued children as young as 12 for downloading music on the now-defunct Napster (Borland 2003). Headline-grabbing cases understandably incited fear in parents and schools. Such examples dominated copyright conversations for most of the early 2000s, and were problematic for many reasons, not least of which because they limited their portrayal of young people as that of mere consumers, rather than as producers of media. In an increasingly corporatized and commercial media culture, copyright conversations are dominated by the perspectives of businesses and adults rather than those of young people, who have their own unique concerns about intellectual property.
At a more local level for students, copyright often revolves around a discussion of plagiarism. Teachers are increasingly and justifiably concerned about students’ buying term papers off the Internet and submitting them as their own work.
In both of these cases, copyright discourse tends to overly focus on what is prohibited and punitive, rather than on what is acceptable and permissible. Piracy and plagiarism are legitimate concerns from business and educational perspectives, but what young people themselves are actually concerned about is theft of their own ideas. The harm-driven expectations of teens as deviants have dominated copyright conversations and neglected to account for teens as media producers. Harm-driven expectations means that many teens miss out on the benefits associated with sharing their own creative media projects online.
Understanding Copyright and Intellectual Property
I will be the first to admit that young people’s concerns that someone might steal their original media content are valid. In today’s digital culture it is all too easy to download or share something and claim it as your own. Furthermore, for students at a school such as Freeway High, theft is a daily threat and reality. Students frequently explained they would like to bring their laptop or tablet to school, but they didn’t because they feared it would be stolen. Gabriela explained why she left her laptop at home this way: “The lockers aren’t reliable, and then, just, I don’t know, I don’t trust people with it. I don’t want it to go missing.” Sergio even believed that the likelihood of theft might have been one of the reasons the school had banned personal technologies in the classroom: “They [school administrators] don't want people using their electronic devices at school because they don't want to deal with the problem of it getting stolen.” Throughout my year at Freeway, I heard an abundant number of personal stories involving theft at school—from mobile phones to car break-ins on school property—theft, or at least the threat of theft, was an unfortunate reality for Freeway High students. Thus, concerns about theft of intellectual property must be contextualized within a larger context of risk: for these students, theft probably was more common than it might have been at more privileged or private schools and in more privileged populations.
Lawrence Lessig is particularly interested in helping young people—and society at large—learn how, when, and where it is appropriate to incorporate copyrighted content into derivative content. In a popular 2007 TED talk, he proclaimed: “We need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, ‘pirates.’ And is that good? … In a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.” This is why Lessig is a strong advocate for the legal doctrine known as fair use, which dictates that under certain circumstances it is acceptable and legal for consumers to use copyrighted material in their own media creations. The copyright doctrine of fair use is complicated, but essentially it grants citizens permission to use limited portions of copyrighted works to teach, critique, parody, inform, or to remix it in order to create derivative works.
Mr. Lopez, the Tech Apps teacher and media club sponsor at Freeway High, was also an advocate for the incorporation of fair use as a way to enable students to create and remix media. He included lessons about intellectual property and copyright into his curriculum for the Tech Apps courses and was well aware that an understanding of and respect for copyright laws is an important aspect of digital literacy. The laws and boundaries of copyright are evolving and tenuous, which present many challenges in the classroom. Nonetheless, Mr. Lopez was an advocate of fair use protections and encouraged his students to remix content as part of their own projects. Additionally, he taught his students about Creative Commons, which was developed by Lessig as an alternative to traditionally restrictive copyright laws. Sometimes referred to as copyleft, Creative Commons licenses were developed as a different and flexible way to protect and share intellectual property. With Creative Commons licenses copyright holders retain some rights, but can also grant permission for others to use, share, copy, and create derivative works without obtaining additional permission from the artist or copyright holder. A copyright holder can choose between different degrees of restriction based on profit, how the content is used, who is using it (i.e., amateur or professional) and so forth. In other words, Creative Commons licenses aim to reinstate a balance between the artists’ rights to profit from and/or protect their intellectual property and consumers’ rights and desires to play with, appropriate, remix, and use existing media texts for fun, critique, or profit.
In addition to allowing anyone to generate a free Creative Commons license to protect their intellectual property, the website also serves as a depository for thousands of Creative Commons licensed work. The value is that media makers and artists can browse the site for music, images, and video clips that they can incorporate into their own productions and mediated texts. Users can rest assured that their use of wor
k licensed under Creative Commons is legally protected so long as they abide by the terms set forth by the respective licenses. Mr. Lopez was a fan of Creative Commons and encouraged his students to take advantage of the repertoire of Creative Commons licensed work:
I teach kids about Creative Commons and about copyright and sharing, being able now to share. There's this one website now that has good pictures. I like using that website because you can pretty much find the Creative Common picture and find the ones that will allow you to use it without having to go request permission. The cool thing is finding the pictures. We do video, finding the raw footage that will look good in a video. The site will pull up, but you can't see any of the pictures because Freeway High is blocking the pictures.
Blocking sites that provided access to Creative Commons works had the unfortunate effect of inadvertently encouraging students to rely on copyrighted materials that weren’t blocked by the school’s filters.
As was discussed in the previous two chapters, students and teachers repeatedly complained about instances in which legitimate and educational material was blocked by the school’s filters. In this particular case, Mr. Lopez’s focus was on the ways the school restricted access to fair use material that would be valuable to the filmmakers in his class who needed music, images, and footage. However, what we need to also consider is how blocking the site disempowered students from creating their own Creative Commons licenses—that is, from safely and legally protecting and sharing their own creative media content.
This is yet another example of the ways understandings of risk undercut opportunities for students to exert agency over their own mediated practices. Instead of recognizing and validating students as producers, copyright curriculum reified a corporate risk discourse that positioned students as consumers. Understandings of intellectual property and respecting copyright laws are essential aspects of becoming digitally literate; however, it is imperative we go a step further and also enable young people to confidently protect their own creative content. Being digitally literate doesn’t mean only understanding how to respect copyright laws (i.e., be a good consumer citizen); it is also about empowering students as creators so they feel comfortable sharing and fully participating in online communities. Many of the students I spoke with had heard of Creative Commons (mostly from Mr. Lopez) but were not aware that they could use the Creative Commons site to generate their own licenses to protect their own creative content.
An opportunity-driven approach would not be based on prohibitions and fear. Instead, expectations of opportunity consider young people as both consumers and producers, by teaching them to respect copyright laws and also to empower them to protect their own intellectual property. At Freeway High, harm-driven expectations abounded. Students were afraid of theft, and the school filtered the Internet to prevent access to inappropriate content. In both cases, students missed out on valuable opportunities to build their online presence, to network with other young media makers, and to fully participate in the online communities they valued. Likewise, because uploading content to public sites was not incorporated as part of the curriculum, teachers were disempowered from helping students in their classroom to protect their own content after it had been shared online.
“I’m not good enough yet”: Professional Aspirations
There are two other overlapping, yet distinct, fears that students frequently expressed as a reason for not sharing their own media content online: fear of unwanted criticism and fear that their content was not good enough/professional enough to share. Significantly, the young people I spoke with were not reacting to earlier negative experiences online, but rather were preemptively choosing not to participate because of expectations of potential harm. Students presumed that the potentially negative consequences and outcomes would outweigh the potential benefits and payoffs. Risks were myopically approached as harmful and therefore as to be avoided; students rarely considered the benefits of taking risks in online participatory spaces.
I met Sergio my first day at Freeway High. Mr. Lopez called on him and his close friend Antonio to show our group around the Digital Media Club and to introduce us to other members. Sergio was a polite young man who was eager to tell us about his positive experiences in the club and about the projects he and his friends were working on together. Over the course of the year, I saw Sergio regularly; he spent many hours in the club almost every day after school. He consistently stayed as late as the teachers would let him, even missing the last bus of the day and would walk home after the club was closed for the evening. Sergio was an active member and leader of the Cinematic Arts Project and was respected by his teachers and peers alike. He took a lot of pride in his films, as well as school. He frequently volunteered to help out with various projects and volunteered at a media camp for children over the summer. He actively sought out advice from his teachers and mentors in the Cinematic Arts Club and valued their input and feedback. In other words, in most respects Sergio was comfortable with critique, feedback, and sharing his media and perspectives. But, as has been noted, he was uncomfortable about sharing his films online.
Sergio:
I haven’t posted any of my videos because I'm not ready for the feedback from other people, so that’s kind of one thing that’s stopping me, criticism of other people.
Q:
Oh, really?
Sergio:
I'm not ready to accept it.
Q:
Why?
Sergio:
I don’t like it, because I’ve seen how people can be on the Internet. They can be really mean, do really mean put-downs. I haven’t really found a site yet that’s supportive.
Because Sergio had shared his films with peers, with mentors, with teachers, with members of the local film community, and with researchers, it was evident that his concerns had more to do with the unique nature of online sharing than with a broader concern about sharing his films in general. Reflecting on the young participants in their study, Lange and Ito write: “Young people struggle over their sense of confidence and safety about sharing their work to wider audiences. As creators get more confident and involved in their work, however, they generally will seek out audiences, and the online environment provides a vehicle for publishing and circulation of their work” (2010, p. 280). Perhaps Sergio’s desire to share was satisfied by sharing his media projects with mentors and peers at school, and thus he was not motivated to share his films with an online audience. However, because his attitude was similar to those of many other teens I got to know in the club, I tend to think it was more complicated than that.
If one had asked practically any student in the clubs whom he or she turned to for help with a film project, Javier’s name probably would have come up. Javier was viewed as a leader within the clubs. Many of the students in the study were Mexican-American, but many had never been to Mexico, or had moved when they were quite young. But Javier had moved from Mexico to the US at the age of 14, and had an older sister who was currently in film school there; this gave him access to perspectives and worldviews different from those of many of his peers. Javier’s mother was a musician and had a few connections in the artistic and creative world, although more so in Mexico than in the US. Unlike some parents I spoke with who were wary of or concerned about their child’s participation in the creative arts and media (see chapter 7), Javier’s parents actively supported his goals and creative aspirations. He was a mature student with lofty goals and never hesitated to share his perspectives and creative insight with you. In fact, the first time I met Javier, he began explaining his views on immigration and world politics; he was a confident idealist with a passion for storytelling and helping others.
Given Javier’s self-assurance, professional aspirations, peer respectability, and technical prowess, I was again surprised to hear that Javier did not share his films online. This was even true of films which he would proudly share with me, his peers, and mentors. His latest film project was a silent, artistic, and reflect
ive short about a mime who watched people as a way to experience and mimic the array of human emotions, from joy to sorrow and everything in between. When I asked why he didn’t share his films online, he replied: “A lot of what’s on YouTube is amateur; I don’t want to be seen as that so I wait until I think my film is ready. I want to build a professional portfolio.” Javier had received validation for his films—including acceptance to film festivals. His concern had more to do with his online reputation rather than a broader concern that his films were not ready to be viewed.
Amateur vs. Professional Video Sharing
From reports of recent research about young people and YouTube, one might get the impression that the so-called digital generation are all interested in sharing their videos online. And certainly some students in this study did upload videos to YouTube and other video sharing sites. For example, Jada (16 years old, black) had shared a user-generated video on YouTube even though she did not self-report to have much interest in media production. She had enrolled in the Tech Apps course to fulfill an elective requirement, but she spent her after-school hours practicing dance moves with the drill team. She was a stylish girl interested in and always ready to discuss the latest fashion trends. Although she didn’t find the time to watch a lot of television, her favorite shows were on entertainment channels such as E! and BET.3 She explained she enjoyed these shows more for the fashion inspiration than for the celebrity gossip. She also liked to get online just to peruse fashion blogs and websites. Her grandmother was teaching her how to sew so she could start making her own accessories and outfits. Jada was also a member of the Business Club, which provided a space for her to explore her interest in the business side of the fashion industry.
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