Category Archives: Copyright

Copyright: The Card Game!

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Do you remember that old Shakespeare quote, “To study or not to study copyright, that is the question”? Well, maybe it wasn’t him and instead was something Cathy said when we were talking about playing “Copyright: The Card Game!”.

But, I digress. In honour of Fair Dealing/Fair Use Week that happens annually during the last week of February in Canada and the United States, the Copyright Office hosted five teams to duke it out in a friendly game of who knows the most about copyright. It was kind of like Crossfit® and who can exercise the fastest. Rumour has it that many of the teams pulled all-nighters and diligently scoured the USask copyright website for hints, tips and other advantages. While noshing on Skittles (#DYK they have been in North America since 1979) and peanut butter M&Ms (which Kate accidentally bought instead of normal M&Ms), to a carefully curated 80s Spotify playlist, teams passionately hovered over their cards in hopes to answer the copyright questions posed by Kate. Critical thinking and the highly competitive nature (who knew!?) of library staff helped bring out the copyright ringers on each team (I’m looking at you Myles!).

At the end of the game, after some well-argued-for bonus points had been awarded, we had to go to a tie-breaker between the Legal Eagles and BrainSTEMS!. BrainSTEMS! edged out the Legal Eagles by milliseconds on the squeezing of the squeaky toy to give the correct answer. Congratulations to Team BrainSTEMs! on their inaugural win!

Thank you to all who attended and supported this event – Team TBD ©, Circulation Formation, The Infringers, Legal Eagles and BrainSTEMS! We look forward to seeing you for the second annual Copyright: The Card Game event!

Adventures in Web Design

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away….

Well, not quite. This story starts about a year ago in the Administration Building. Kate and I were at the beginning of a project to update the copyright website, and our first challenge was to figure out how to start. I found a “goals interview” to do with Kate, which included questions such as:

  1. What are your top goals for the site?
  2. What are the most common complaints you get about the current website or content you have online?
  3. What do you want users to do on your website or as a result of visiting your site?

One key goal for the new website was to make it more user friendly. After determining our goals, it became possible for us to lay out the tasks we needed to do to transition from the old site to the new site. For example, we thought a lot about how to decrease wordiness, which meant deleting “click here” from every other sentence.

My only knowledge of the workings of the internet came from watching The Matrix trilogy, Hackers (not sure if that even counts) and Halt and Catch Fire, but I’m no Cameron (Cameron is a rad tech genius from Halt and Catch Fire). I knew I had to do some further investigation on the subject.

We devised a plan, and slowly but surely tackled our project, page by page, section by section. We printed, cut out and reorganized the existing copyright website pages, and added new content as we went. It was especially fun to predict what we thought the new homepage should look like (Ms. Cleo has the answers).

We reviewed external sites and U of S sites for inspiration. Shout out to the UBC Copyright site and the U of S Teaching and Learning site, from which we got many good ideas.

I learned about content management, content inventory, and gap analysis via Lynda.com. We used the white board, created excel spreadsheets, and became intimately familiar with Cascade. I pushed my creative limits to the edge and opened Photoshop. We ran the gamut of every tool and person in our arsenal.

And here we are today, just a little bit over a year later, with a new site that we are both very proud of – https://library.usask.ca/copyright/. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed reimagining it. But, by no means is our adventure over. We hope to add more images, instructional videos, Prezi presentations and infographics in the near future.

Thanks again to anyone and everyone who helped us to launch this new-and-improved copyright website!

“I Support Fair Dealing”: Quick Advocacy for Fair Copyright

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by Kate Langrell, Copyright Coordinator

This week is Fair Dealing Week 2018. Fair Dealing Week is an annual event to educate and raise awareness about the many benefits of the fair dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act. This exception helps to balance the rights of copyright owners with the needs of those who use copyright-protected materials for certain purposes, including research, private study and education.

Some common, practical activities that fair dealing may cover include:

  • University professors and instructors handing out a short excerpt from a book to students enrolled in their classes, without having to seek copyright clearance every time
  • Students compiling resources in order to study, write papers or do projects for their coursework
  • Sharing of materials between a team of researchers, facilitating collaboration

Fair Dealing Week is also key opportunity for fair dealing advocacy. The Copyright Act is being reviewed by the federal government this year, and the loss of fair dealing for educational purposes would be a considerable blow to all Canadian educational institutions.

I think that anyone who has done advocacy work is likely to tell you that advocacy is, by no means, a “quick” activity overall. With the busyness of day-to-day library work, it can easily fall by the wayside. However – if you have 10 minutes this week that can be spent offering your support for Fair Dealing, here are few quick opportunities for you:

  • Sign the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUTs’) petition in support of Fair Dealing at caut.ca/petition
    • CAUT has created this petition in “support [of] preserving balance in the Copyright Act by protecting the fair dealing rights of students and educators.” (http://copyright.caut.ca/petition)
  • Submit your own Fair Dealing testimonial at http://fair-dealing.ca/testimonial/
  • Share or post about Fair Dealing on social media
    • Check out the hashtags #fairdealing, #fairdealingweek, #faircopyright and #fairdealingworks this week to catch the fair dealing discussion, and tweet/retweet about it to your heart’s content!
    • In January 2018, CAUT launched a Twitter campaign encouraging creators to Tweet a picture of themselves (a.k.a., a selfie) with the copyright-protected work(s) that they have created, and caption it something to the effect of “I am a creator and I support #fairdealing.” If that is true of you, please consider Tweeting this @CAUT_ACPPU.