Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Jail (Copyright & Fair Use)
It’s what you get when you claim Wikipedia’s summary of The Great Gatsby as your own original genius.
What is Plagiarism?
CC stands for this, a non-profit organization that gives creators a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their work.
What is Creative Commons?
Unlike expensive software like Adobe Photoshop, this type of software makes its raw source code freely available for anyone to inspect, modify, and enhance.
What is Open-Source Software?
DMCA stands for this, a 1998 US law that criminalizes the act of bypassing anti-piracy measures on software.
What is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
If you use ChatGPT to write the code for your AP CSP Create Task, you are violating College Board rules and committing this academic offense.
What is Plagiarism / Academic Dishonesty?
This legal doctrine allows you to use a tiny 5-second clip of a Drake song in your YouTube video review without getting sued into oblivion.
What is Fair Use?
If a CC license has this condition (represented by a crossed-out dollar sign), you can't use their code to make your new hit app and sell it for $1.99 on the App Store.
What is NonCommercial (NC)?
This global online encyclopedia is one of the most famous examples of crowdsourced, open-access information in human history.
What is Wikipedia?
This three-letter acronym refers to the digital locks companies put on DVDs, ebooks, and Spotify tracks to stop you from copying them.
What is DRM (Digital Rights Management)?
When an AI hiring tool accidentally starts rejecting all resumes from a specific demographic, it is demonstrating this ethical flaw, usually caused by bad training data.
What is Algorithmic Bias?
This term describes works like Shakespeare's plays or Beethoven's symphonies, which are completely free for anyone to use, remix, or turn into a terrible TikTok dance.
What is the Public Domain?
This condition (an equal sign "=") means you can share the creator's meme, but you absolutely cannot remix it, crop it, or add laser eyes to it.
What is NoDerivatives (ND)?
Open Access usually refers to unrestricted online access to these highly credible, scholarly documents, so you don't hit a $40 paywall when doing AP research.
What are Peer-Reviewed Research Papers (or Academic Journals)?
If a Twitch streamer plays copyrighted music during their live stream, they might get hit with one of these actions that mutes or deletes their video.
What is a DMCA Takedown (or Copyright Strike)?
The digital divide isn't just about having an internet connection; it's also about having the skills to use technology effectively, known as Digital this.
What is Digital Literacy?
The creator of a computing innovation automatically gets this legal protection the very moment their work is fixed in a tangible medium. No registration required!
What is Copyright?
This condition means if you remix my open-source code, you must release your new code under the exact same terms. Welcome to the collective.
What is ShareAlike (SA)?
This popular version control platform, bought by Microsoft, is where millions of developers host, share, and collaborate on open-source projects.
What is GitHub?
Pirating software is illegal, but cracking the DRM on your own iPhone or John Deere tractor just to fix it yourself is part of this growing ethical movement.
What is the Right to Repair movement?
Generative AI models are currently facing massive lawsuits because they were trained on millions of these without the original creators' permission or compensation.
What are copyrighted images/artworks/articles?
On January 1, 2024, Steamboat Willie (the original Mickey Mouse) finally entered the public domain after being locked up for exactly this many years.
What is 95 years?
Even with the most permissive license out there ("CC BY"), a creator still requires this ONE thing from you if you use their work.
What is Attribution (or giving credit)?
This is the critical difference between "Freeware" (like a free-to-play mobile game) and "Open-Source software" (like the Linux operating system).
What is access to the source code? (Freeware doesn't let you see or change the code).
The DMCA includes a "Safe Harbor" provision, which protects websites like YouTube or TikTok from being sued for copyright infringement as long as they do this one specific thing.
What is promptly remove the infringing content when notified?
In 2023, the US Copyright Office ruled that a comic book generated entirely by AI could not be copyrighted because it lacked this essential legal element.
What is Human Authorship?