Communication FUNdamentals

Feb. 17, 2007

Speak Up Saturday: "Sharing" Curricula

A new homeschooler may not be able to afford all the curricula she wants for her children.  Looking on the net she finds a website or Yahoo group that says they "share" curricula.  While this may sound like a blessing for the new homeschooler who can now take advantage of the wonderful tools available to teach her precious children, let's look a little closer at what this really means.  The word "share" has many meanings.  You can have the lion's share.  You can share your feelings.  You can share the Gospel, but you cannot "share" what belongs to someone else.   Let's examine the word "share" a bit more closely.  According to Merriam Webster.com, "Share usually implies that one as the original holder grants to another the partial use, enjoyment, or possession of a thing <shared my toys with the others>." The first part of this says  "the original holder grants to another".   We teach our children to share their toys, but it would be wrong of our son to "share" his friend's toy by giving it to someone else.  It isn't his to share.  When you purchase Abeka Math 4th Grade, you own the book for your own use.  You do not own the rights to "share" this information with anyone else.  Making copies of the first six chapters of the book to use in a co op class of 25 children is not "sharing".  Scanning the book and uploading it for public use so others don't need to purchase from the publisher is not "sharing".  For you cannot share what you do not own. The next part of this says "grants to another the partial use, enjoyment, or possession of a thing".  Partial use means that the owner may allow others to view or use a free lesson from the text, or give away a excerpt from their novel.  Yet I have seen well meaning homeschoolers copy an entire workbook.  I have also seen someone scan whole texts, upload them to the web and make them available for free!   While gaining access to some of the wonderful curricula that is out there can be a blessing to a homeschool family, let's look at this from the perspective of the publisher (owner).  Let's say your family has passed down wonderfully unique recipes for generations.  You decide to write a cookbook where you provide all of these delicious recipes.  It takes you approximately a year to gather them all up, write the rough draft and have it edited and proofed.  You find a printer who will agree to print them for you at a reasonable cost, but be cause you are not a huge publisher, you cannot afford to purchase in great bulk so your printing costs are a little higher than you would like.  You purchase a website and pay a web designer to set it up and maintain it for you.  Or you spend time, perhaps a month or two, designing it yourself.  Now you have to let others know you have this wonderful cookbook in order to sell them and recoup your investment and your hard work.  You pay for advertising and spend time networking with others to get a name for yourself in the community.  After about five or ten years you are well-known enough that people are beginning to ask for your cookbooks and you are finally making a profit.  Now along comes someone who just LOVES your recipes but she cannot afford to purchase your cookbook.  She borrows it from a friend.  She loves the recipes so much that she wants to "share" them with her sister, so she makes a copy of the recipes in your cookbook and mails them to her sister.  Her sister loves them so much that she makes copies and gives them out to all 50 of the homeschoolers in her support group.  One of the support group members loves them so much that she uploads them onto her Yahoo group.  One of the Yahoo group members loves them so much that she scans them into her website and offers them for free to all of her visitors.  Visitors find out that these wonderful family recipes are available for free they begin to inform their online friends that they don't need to buy this book because someone is "sharing" them on the internet for free!  In just a year's time it becomes a popular and well known website and pretty soon you are no longer able to sell your cookbook because so many are getting the recipes for free!  Now let's say that over the last ten years you had come to rely on the income from selling these cookbooks to support your family: pay the mortgage and the gas and light bills.  However, because of so many "sharing" your popular cookbook that took you ten years of your life to write and build a following for, you can no longer make your livelihood.  Copying curricula isn't just copyright infringement, it's hurting those who took the time and money and effort to create them.  It isn't a victimless crime.  It hurts all publishers and their families and it can discourage new publishers from publishing their own works.  How sad to have those creative ideas never make it to the homeschooling community because the creator doesn't want to go through years of hard work and struggle only to find his work on some website for free. From JoJo's Purple Crayon...

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Comments

Feb. 17, 2007 - That is SO true!

Posted by queserasera

But it's like everyone wants to pretend it's okay. We've been having a problem like this at our church. My DH does the copying of the dvd's of church services, and they wanted him to make copies of services they bought from another church's conference...he called the pastor of that church and asked about, and was told not to, of course, because that's how they support their conference, in part. He's actually had to listen to people tell him he was wrong to ask...that it's just for the congergation, so it's okay...all kinds of things. I told him, if someone started making copies of their nephew's cd he just had made...making copies and giving them out for hardly anything....they would have SUCH a hissy fit. But still they think it's okay for them to do it with other's property. I just don't get it. But, great post.

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Feb. 18, 2007 - I agree!

Posted by servingtheKingofkings

It is sad that some Christians copy this and that..and think they have done nothing wrong. It is wrong because it is illegal, unethical, inconsiderate, and it dishonors God! He sees even when others don't. Great post, JoJo!

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