The Duke Law School has decided to use a new approach to explain some challenging concepts – copyright and fair use. The idea is to embed core ideas within the story line of a comic book. The storyline follows the adventures of a filmmaker and her struggles with the reality of fair use. The link I provide offers access to a paper and Flash version.
Resource produced by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
See Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth for a more detailed account. It was his post that brought this resource to me attention. Andy’s post contains some additional information regarding the sharing of resources across blogs and the license that allows such sharing.
An aside – encountering an example of an online comic is timely for me. I gave an exam in my grad EdTech class a week ago containing a question that asked students to evaluate the potential of an online comic book as a multimedia format for presenting complex ideas. The question was more focused on some of the multiple media vs. multiple modality issues raised by Mayer. The examples in his research articles looked like the panels from a comic book to me. So, for my students who also follow my blog, the idea was not as unrealistic as you thought.
