I’ve been invited to do a presentation of Copyright the Card Game for another college. This came about as a result of a presentation Chris and Jane gave for Creative Commons’ 24 x Open Education Lightning Talks. Other people are so much better at promoting my work than I am.
This will be interesting because the game, as I have presented it in the past, is very much built around hands-on f2f small group interaction – every thing we can’t do now. So my plan is to use Zoom, breakout rooms, Google Docs and forms, extra helpers, and hopefully come up with a nice experience for all.
I was asked about promotional material for the workshop, and got the idea to do something with one of those dogs-playing-cards paintings. I could take A Friend in Need and substitute copyright cards for the ones the dogs are holding. I did some quick photoshoppery on the visible cards, and realized I didn’t really need to change the others. In reaching for a caption, I came up with a conversation about the image involving someone who thinks it’s a violation to use it. To make that work, I made a PowerPoint slide show, animating the text of the conversation coming in and out of the screen. I thought it could use a soundtrack as well, so I did a CC search for some ragtime music. I found Sometime Ragtime by nekonohige which was nice, short, and felt to me like it went with the painting. I added in my Fun and Games with Copyright animated GIF as a second slide and exported it as a movie, and voila!
I think it needs more work, but I like it because the painting is in the public domain, and the music has a Creative Commons license, so it embodies some of the copyright issues we will discuss. I suspect it fails in a way too, because without familiarity with the cards the meaning gets lost. But the dogs are funny.
