I am sending this email as a suggestion for a Web site that I feel would be a tremendous asset to teaching and the sharing of on-line resources on and about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I work for the Church Educational System (CES) and have been extremely impressed by the work that the More Good Foundation has been doing in promoting the the Church on-line. Recently in CES there have been some extensive discussions on the use of copyrighted materials. Our leadership is very aware and concerned about these issues and the sharing of even Church copyright materials in our classrooms with other teachers. As always, they are approaching the issue with extreme caution to ensure that they are always within any legal and ethical boundaries.
The CES organization seems to still be working out many details of what their specific policies will be. It is my understanding that some of these same issues are being addressed in the Worldwide Church. My concern is the extent to which we are being discouraged from using and sharing with each other resources that may be copyrighted. It is unrealistic to expect the general member of the Church to understand the complexities of "fair use" of copyrighted materials or be familiar with the process of obtaining a release for use of a copyrighted work in a classroom or other limited setting. With that in mind, it may be necessary to prohibit the use of good materials legal to use in certain situations, simply to avoid any risk of copyright violations.
Somewhere there needs to be a resource that provides simple, easy to use guidelines on the use of materials as well as a clearinghouse of materials that have been approved for specific uses.
One idea would be to create a LDS repository of materials that anyone in the Church could use in their own lessons or share online labeled with an acceptable list of uses so that people could use materials without the concern of violating copyright. A good model might be to consider a Creative Commons License (or a derivative) ( http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/ ) with content placed into a Common Content ( http://commoncontent.org/ ) type of directory.
This collection might include works already be in the public domain and from there could go into a number of directions. Pieces of work from prominent LDS artists or authors, video clips or maybe even LDS-themed PowerPoint themes or presentations. The scope of content could be as limited or expansive as the creator of such a site would like. Content owners may be interested in offering some of their content for free in order to promote awareness of their company.
Please let me know if you have any interest, if not, do you have any feedback on the feasibility of such an idea?
Thanks,
Christopher Phillips
http://www.ldsability.org/
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