Teaching Ideas

Owning Intangibles

One way to teach copyright issues to students of virtually any age is through a lesson on owning intangibles. Because the lesson purposefully sets up an injustice in the classroom, the teacher should handle it mindfully and sensitively.

• Provide each student with a plastic bottle with his/her name on it.
• Over the course of the week, assign values (i.e., student privileges) to students' bottles by inserting slips of paper identifying the privilege (e.g., a "get out of homework free" pass, a treat at lunch, or a movie pass ). These values should be treated as a reward for good behavior or participation (but should be independent of actual grades).
• When every bottle has been granted a value (note: some bottles may have been granted more than one value), collect the bottles.
• Randomly select a few students and allow them to choose three or four of the bottles, and then return the remaining bottles to their owners.
• Have a class discussion where you discuss students' feelings of their treatment, concepts of value and intangibility, and then extend the discussion to apply these concepts to copyright issues.

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