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Digital Citizenship

Lesson Overview

In creative fields, creatives frequently remix, reference, and build upon existing work.

However, many students lack a clear understanding of copyright law, fair use, and ethical attribution, which can lead to unintentional misuse of others’ work or limited understanding of their own rights as creators.

❋ Lesson Focus

  • Fair use

  • Creative Commons licensing

  • Public domain

  • Permission and attribution

  • Students learn how to evaluate whether and how they can legally and ethically use existing creative work in their own designs.

❋ Learning to Evaluate

  • Who owns this work?

  • Is my use transformative or copying?

  • Does my use impact the original creator’s ability to profit?

  • Do I need permission, or is this fair use?

  • Rather than avoiding copyrighted material entirely, students learn how to make informed, ethical choices about when and how to use it.

❋ Activities

  • Watch a clip from Everything is a Remix

  • Read and discuss fair use, Creative Commons, permissions, and public domain

  • Find, define, and discuss examples of copyrighted work being reused

  • Discuss how these laws apply to them as creatives and how it will impact their process

  • Adapted from Copyright & Creativity

❋ Connection

As students develop their own projects and client proposals for their portfolio work, this lesson will help them:

  • Use only appropriately licensed or original content

  • How to use existing works to create something new

  • Attribute all sources

  • Know how copyright protects their work

Lesson Plan

  • Starting with a clip from Everything is a Remix, students will watch and discuss the domino effect of creation and recreation and the influences that created works hold on further creation.

  • Jigsaw: Students will read documents that each explain Fair Use, Creative Commons, Permissions, and Public Domain. Core groups will read, discuss, then bring the information to their jigsaw groups. 

    Discussion: Why do these laws matter? Who do they protect? What purpose do they serve? Why do we need to know them as students and creatives?

  • In small groups, students will find an example of copyrighted work being re-used and what it is an example of (Fair Use, Creative Commons, Permissions, Public Domain). These can be parodies, remixes, or copyright infringements (and their lawsuits) for example. 

    Students will post on padlet a representation of the original work and the new work, who created each of them, what it is an example of, and what we should know or learn from it.

    Groups will briefly present what they posted on padlet.

  • Discussion: Thinking back to the first video that we watched about remixing, and now learning about the laws in place to protect creative property, how does this impact how you will create art? If everything is a “remix” how do we create something new? How do we protect ourselves as creatives from breaking these laws?