Teaching Ideas

Ownership and Copyright

Key Ideas

Ownership can apply to intangible things. Owning something gives the owner specific rights regarding its use.

Materials

1. A plastic soft drink or water bottle for each student
   
2. A marker that will write on the bottle (i.e. a Sharpie)
   
3. Pencil and paper
   
4. A box large enough to hold all the bottles (optional)

Background

This activity is designed to explore the topic of ownership of intangible things such as music, writing, images, etc. Section 106 of the U.S. legal code gives copyright owners specific exclusive rights in copyrighted works. These rights can be summarized as follows: a copyright owner has exclusive rights of reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display of copyrighted works.

Procedure

1. At the beginning of the week, each student will be assigned a plastic soft drink or water bottle. The student will write his or her name on the bottle. (Make sure to rinse the bottle first if it is a soft drink bottle.)
   
2. Throughout the week, during the course of other daily lessons, the instructor assigns "value" to individual students' bottles. The value should be framed in terms of a "get out of homework free" pass, a treat at lunch, a movie pass (often a local theater will be glad to donate a pass), special recognition at assembly, etc. The instructor assigns value based on such things as classroom behavior or quality of work. For example, an instructor may decide to reward a particular student for being the first person in his seat and ready for the day's lesson by assigning his bottle a value of one homework exemption pass. Another student who participates productively in a class discussion may receive an "extra 10 minutes at lunch" pass. When the teacher assigns a value to the bottle, the student notes it on a slip of paper and puts it inside the bottle. (Note: Be sure to assign values that are independent of a student's actual grade.)
   
3. When all students' bottles have been assigned a particular value (Note: some bottles may have more than one slip of paper in them), the instructor collects all of the bottles. A large box comes in handy for this.
   
4. The instructor selects a few students at random and gives them permission to rummage through the box and take three to five bottles each.
   
5. The instructor then returns the remaining bottles to their owners.

Class Discussion Topics

1. If your bottle was taken from you, do you feel like you have been treated unfairly? Why or why not?
   
2. If you got to take bottles from your classmate, do you feel like this was fair? Why or why not?
   
3. If your bottle was returned to you, do you feel like you have been harmed in any way simply because some of your classmates' bottles weren't returned?
   
4. If you knew that your bottle could be taken from you by a classmate and there was nothing you could do about it, would it influence your attempts to increase your bottle's value? Why or why not?
   
5. The word Intangible means not perceptible to the touch. Can you own something intangible like "special recognition?" Explain.
   
6. What are some other intangible things that can be owned? (Examples: a song, an image, a written story, a recording of a speech, a movie, etc.)
   
7. If a person owns the copyright to something (a book, a song, an image, etc.), that person has the exclusive right to control its reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display. Can you describe some ways that a copyright owner might be harmed by someone who ignores these rights?
   
8. How is taking someone else's bottle similar to copying a CD of your favorite band's music to give to a friend. How is it different? Would making a copy of a CD to give to a friend harm anyone?
   
9. Imagine that you are putting together a personal homepage to display on the Internet. Do you think you should be able to download images you find on someone else's site and use them on your site? Why or why not?
   
10. Can you think of any circumstances under which you believe copyright rules should not strictly apply? For example, what if you were discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life in your science class and your teacher decided to show the movie Contact, which deals with this subject, to the whole class. Should he be allowed? Why or why not?

Assessment

The class discussion could accomplish a good part of the assessment in this lesson, but a more measurable option might be to use a brief writing assignment. You could simply ask students to reflect on what they learned through the activity, or if you want to be more direct, you could save one or more of the discussion questions (questions 7, 8, and/or 9 would work very well for this) for a writing assignment.

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