The Berkman Center for Internet and Society offers a free online class called “Copyright X”, which invites the interested public to learn about copyright. To join the class one must submit a 2000 word essay describing one’s interest. This is my essay, a bit longer than what I actually submitted with the 3000 character limit.
I am interested in the Copyright X class because I am a Wikipedia and Wikimedia contributor and as such, I routinely make decisions about copyright and teach copyright to others. Already I am familiar with Wikimedia community’s practices on evaluating copyright, and I thought that by taking the class, I would for the first time get formal training from professionals who use copyright in contexts other than Wikipedia. If I could see other perspectives, then I expect that would inform my activities on Wikipedia, and consequently improve the quality of my work and make me more helpful in my community on Wikipedia. That is my full explanation – what follows is my personal introduction to copyright.
I grew up in Southeast Texas of the United States. This area is known for being rural have having conservative values. In the late 1990s I went to university near Dallas, a large city in the same state and some hours from my hometown. This was the first time I had been away from home, and my first time living around people of the sort that existed outside of Southeast Texas.
I was living in the dormitory of the college and on one day within weeks of moving in, there was a house meeting in one of the common areas. I was enjoying attending all kinds of social groups at my new college and was feeling free and connected to college life and joining in all kinds of things, and had been to other meetings for my house before this one. I hardly remember what the other meetings were about, but perhaps they were about amenities of the university, or how to join clubs, and how to get help for classes. I found these meetings fun.
I did not go to this particular house meeting with any expectations, but when I got there, we got coached on two very serious subjects. First, someone was there to give us sex education! The counselor there told us that students sometimes have sex, and that sex can spread diseases and make babies, and that there are condoms even in the dorm and around campus. Also there was a campus clinic were people could talk about sexual health. It was a rather light and cursory overview, but I remembered thinking for myself that the talk was surprising because were I was from in Southeast Texas, sexual education was never part of my education at school.
The background here is that many people in the United States of this time period knew about the major political debates about sexual education for people under age 18. My community’s values were that people under age 18 should have limited access to any information about sex, and should be prohibited from thinking about sex and definitely from having it. The health intervention that they made available is called “abstinence-only sex education“. My community had no plans for people after age 18, but in general, the thought was that sex before marriage was taboo and that marriage happened after college. I suppose another thought was that teenagers did not need sex. In retrospect, I look back on how ignorant people were about sexuality before the advent of Internet and how so many people seemed to have conspired against each other to hide the existence of sexuality before everyone could freely talk online. The way that the Internet changed sexuality is another story, but for this story, I want to express that I was getting information that is tame by today’s standards but shocking to me then.
What has happening in this time and place was that there were a range of young people, almost all around age 18, almost all from hometowns within some hours of this bigger city where this college was. All of us were shy about talking about sex in a way that Internet connected people just cannot be anymore. I know I was not alone in feeling surprise at the frankness of the recognition that we might have sex, and that we were responsible for making decisions and considering our own health. I think there was hardly even mention of emotional responsibility; as I remember this, it was just about using condoms to prevent pregnancy and infection. This talk wrapped up, then someone else presented to us about the other great responsibility on us.
Now that we were on own our, in addition to being able to slut around now, we would also be tempted with copying files using university computers or Internet connections and in violation of some law that could get us expelled and arrested. They gave us the copyright scare talk right after the pregnancy and AIDS scare talk. I am sure they hardly planned this and looking back, what happened was that someone decided that us students needed these two serious talks so someone just scheduled them for the same time and place, but somehow in my ignorance I just imagined that a talk about sex and a talk about copyright were coming of age rituals always passed on from time immemorial and that there was some natural affinity for these two topics and the passage to adulthood.
I hardly remember what they said because all of this was more foreign to me than safe sex. They definitely did not want us copying software or downloading music. The consequences of doing so were so horrible that lives could be ruined. There was no way to hide. We need not worry, but it was normal and expected that we only use things on the computer that we bought. Discussion about plagiarism, which in contemporary time is the more serious academic problem, was not part of the discussion that day.
I would like to think that we are living in more enlightened times now in which all kinds of adult issues can be discussed even by adolescents who need the information. I resent that copyright threats had somehow trickled into my college dormitory and were spread to be enforced on par with more real social issues, but just the same, I understand how all people need some introduction to copyright as they enter the connected world. I hope that in my future I do my part to make a world where a copyright initiation is not presented so intensely as it was to me, because it was a silly consequence of my generation that this happened to me in this way.