Teaching Ideas

Copyright violation on the Web

This is an effective research activity that teaches what is wrong with violating copyright on the web. It works very well in conjunction with a larger teaching unit that deals with a group of related themes, such as world religions.

• Assign each student or group one item to research on the web (e.g., Hinduism or Islam)
• Ask each student to pay attention and to count as they do their research how many times the same content is used over and over again (i.e., how many times the same words appear on multiple web sites)
• Ask your students to see if they can determine the original authoring web site.
• Discuss how easy it is to violate copyright on the Internet and the problems with doing so.

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