Thing #15

From what I managed to gather from the cute and interesting YouTube video, the owners of a permanent / original work have to pay a token sum of money for the Copyright law to enforce the law that ONLY the owner has the right to use the copyrighted work.
Copyrights can be for a lot of things such as movies, music, articles, etc. In order to encourage the creation of ideas, only the form of the idea can be copyrighted, not the idea itself. Hmm…what exactly does it mean?

Initially the copyright lasts only for 14 years, after which anyone can use it in the public domain. Eventually, copyrights last 70 years for an individual and 100 years for a company...which is as good as a lifetime really.

The limitation of a copyright is that depending on the nature of work, anyone can borrow a small amount of a copyrighted work to teach for non-commercial use.

In the present context of collaborative learning, Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that allows owners of original works to change their licenses from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved” so that their works can be improved on through sharing. In particular, ccLearn supports open learning and the sharing of educational resources. But I’m wondering…for an educational institution, all the notes prepared by the academic staff belong to the institution. So does it mean that the educational institution is the owner of the notes?