Monday 19 October 2015

The Legal Side of Things - Thing 19

Those of you who have been following my posts throughout the Rudai experience will have undoubtedly heard me mention before that using images online tends to scare me a bit. I know where I stand with a book - it's so much easier to figure out who and when for purposes of referencing. I find using material online or from online sources to be less predictable. You don't necessarily know who owns the material or work, whether they allow you to use it and how to reference it. So this post by Rudai 23 was of great interest.

Copyright and the technicalities of it tends to be something I shy aware from - dreadful to say it out loud as a librarian but it's true. I tend to see copyright as the image below

Maximilian on Pixabay.com (CC0 Public Domain)
A bit murky and grey with very little light getting in. I much prefer asking someone in my organisation about copyright issues; to get clarification rather than rely on my own knowledge.

The task for this Thing was to blog about the possibilities, issues or concerns that this subject has raised about the content you have personally created during the course.

I don't really have any concerns as largely my posts have been text based and if I have referred to someone else's ideas, I have referenced them.  All thoughts and reflections have been my own. I have also stayed clear of images so I haven't really blundered into wrongly attributing someone's work - at least not to my knowledge. However I have wanted to introduce more images to make the blog more interesting and I suppose that not really knowing what I'm doing has put me off.

I wonder also about the ownership of the screencast created in Thing 9.  I consider it to be mine as I created it but I haven't asserted any sort of licence or creative hold over it.  I don't know whether I need to.  I'll take my chances though as I can't imagine anyone wanting to use it for anything unless it is to hold it up as a shining example of how a screencast shouldn't look!

My blog doesn't have any sort of disclaimer on it.  In fact my twitter account is the only thing that mentions that my opinions are my own and aren't reflective of my employers. I don't usually put anything controversial on it so I should be fine in that regard and possibly to be extra safe, I should had a disclaimer to the blog.

In work, we do have a social media policy in order to guide the work of the social media team. It identifies our social persona, the targets we're reaching for in terms of followers or reaches and how we communicate with our audience. Again it doesn't cover how staff are to use social media within work or whether we should distance ourselves from our employer outside of work. I can only think of one occasion where post by a staff member under a personal name had to be questioned. A certain amount of common sense and a feeling of responsibility has to come into play.

After Thing 19 from Rudai, I don't think I have cleared up the issue of copyright completely, but I have more of any idea of what I'm looking for.
Unsplash on Pixabay.com (CC0 Public Domain)

The sunlight is eventually coming through to clear away that copyright gloom.

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