The first time I heard stuff about Intellectual Property and Creative License was during my days in University. At the moment when I was already in my penultimate year and getting set to dive into the adventure that final year has in store, it turned out it's scheduled in Nigerian Universities that all penultimate students need to take a course in Academic Research.
That was the course that prepared us for academic project research and report. I paid very good attention to the series of lectures scheduled for that course because I knew I didn't have the finance to pay someone who would do my project research and report for me. Some students had the money. So, they didn't have to worry about their Final Year project. Well, I had to do mine on my own. So, I didn't mess around during that Course.
Thank goodness for the things I learned back then. That was when I realized that there is a limit to the level of things we can take online, especially when we are trying to personalize a particular thing. If I'm writing about anything, I can't just go online and copy everything that sounds rich because I want to use that to improve the quality of my work.
Nope! That's not proper.
I ended up writing my project of about 65 pages without overusing anything that wasn't originally mine. Of course, I did a shit ton of research both online and offline. I took some data from Nigerian statistical Bulletin because my academic research was related to Economics and Finance. I also gave proper citation for each secondary data I used in my research. However, I did everything within the fair usage policy to avoid getting burnt by copyright laws.
My project supervisor back then, Mrs. Okoyeuze, was way too smart for the position she occupied. Haha. She's the very first person that introduced me to plagiarism checker because she always asks for soft copy of each chapter of our work and she uses her plagiarism detection software to scan each project report that's submitted to her. Haha.
All that was happening around 2017/2018. Fast-forward to this moment where I now work as part of a team in a project where I have to screen all content submitted to the website to be sure that there is no copyright infringement in any of the content. And, this isn't only limited to the wording and sentences in the post. I also check to be sure that contents about music are written without any sort of copyright infringement due to excessive quoting of lyrics. I also check images used in such posts to be sure that everything is free to use. Haha.
Even in this moment, I'm doing my research about what is acceptable as fair use for videos that will be uploaded on YouTube, TikTok and 3Speak. That's where my attention have been turning to and I want to learn all about that. Not just because I want to be sure that my content that gets uploaded to places like that would be allowed to go far and wide. Nope. That's not even the major reason. The main reason is because I don't want to steal anybody's work. That's why I need to understand the fair use policy.
That's also why y'all need to have good understanding of all these before copying any quote from the Internet or sharing any picture from the Internet on a post you are publishing on places like Hive. It just doesn't hurt to be careful. It also doesn't hurt to only use stuff within fair use.
Thanks For Not Missing Any Full-stop or Comma.
Thumbnail Image is taken from Unsplash
This is my entry to today's prompt on #aprilinleo monthly prompt. Feel free to check out the post and explore their prompt.