Week 3 - #2 Creative Rights & Intellectual Property

Why is intellectual property and creative rights an important topic for students? 

Students need to understand why creative rights & intellectual property is important and why they cannot and should not pass off others work or ideas as their own. Too many of today's students do not know that what they are doing in terms of using other peoples work and/or ideas without giving proper credit to the author.

In a world where 90% of the information that we use is on the internet, we need to remember that someone actually took the time to put it there. It is their work that you are accessing and students need to understand that using it without proper citation is again the law and can bring federal charges against them.

Michael Rappa wrote the article Intellectual Property on the Web and he speaks about how the work that our students commonly use is protected under law through the use of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The sooner our students realize that WHENEVER they use something from the web, they need to be giving credit where credit is due.