Wild Wild West or www.regulation

WWW.   Is that World Wide Web or Wild Wild West?  Is it time for the www to come to an end?  Last week,  Wikipedia and its friends went black to protest the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) legislation.  Lots has been said about these topics and anytime something like this hits Washington it gets a dozen different spins.  This post is not designed to rehash the pros and cons of these two acts specifically, but rather to address the topics of legislation in this basically free and "Wild West" virtual world of the Internet.  
The government has basically kept their hands out of the law-making business in regards to the Internet beyond the attempted laws to protect children and citizens from viewing or becoming victims to inappropriate behaviors/crimes.  We may have noticed an increase of legislation as state governments attempt to protect local businesses by taxing online sales.  But this is first, very public, attempt of the federal government to directly hold companies and individuals accountable for use of information (most copy written and owned by others) that is posted online for some kind of profit and ownership or covert reason.  Is it time for this kind of legislation? Are corporations, organizations, governments able to "police" enough to protect intellectual properties with or without a federal law?  
In the schools and education it is common for students and the schools to use information found on the Internet for educational purposes and most uses are protected under fair use copyright clauses.  But what happens when those students who have, for years, used others ideas, images, audio files, for presentations in education and learning now move into the corporate world where now corporate profit, salaries, and promotions are at stake?  Fair use and educational purposes are not vaild when someone is making money or receiving promotions for creating "original" documents and sales presentations from others' ideas.  This is where legislation and laws come into play.  Is it time to address these issues beyond basic copyright laws?  Should the individual be responsible for their actions or should companies like Google, Wikipedia or others be held responsible for allowing postings of copyright materials?  
Most would agree that more legislation is not the answer, but is some legislation needed to draw a line?  The question becomes where is the line and who is going to be in charge of that line?  When it comes to the Internet, those questions are gray and fuzzy.  The concepts and ideas are intangible and when posted online, can even be difficult to attribute to an individual.  
It seems that last weeks protest got the attention of people; I know in our school students and staff noticed that Wikipedia was not accessible.  Will discussion continue outside of Washington now that the "protest" is over?  Will lots of money and interest groups control what happens to the Internet as it does with many other aspects of our legislation?  Discussion between the intellectual properties of education and corporation, and the Internet holders of those intellectual properties of Google and Wikipedia, and government officials need to continue this discussion.  What makes this whole discussion difficult as a general citizen is who is representing whom?  Ideally, the government should represent the people, but that is put into question constantly.  We need to remember who the Internet properties represent because they have positioned themselves to say that they represent the individual.  We need to be careful of that.  We need to follow this and make our voices heard.  The Internet is ingrained in our lives whether we like it or not and this is too important to put in the hands of stake holders who do not have us, the people, in mind.  We are more important than the dollar, hopefully.  
Knee-jerk legislation cannot pass because we all know, once legislation is in play, it is almost impossible to rescind, and it ends up constantly getting morphed with "improvements."  Hopefully, discussion and collaboration can result in laws that do what they are intended to do: Protect those that use the Internet and ideas that are shared. 

Internet Security

Last year at our school, the IT director and I started a series of Internet safety lessons that we teach to each different grade in the school from 6th to 12th grades. We cover topics from evaluating websites for research to Social Networking.  What is always interesting is that the students almost always know more about certain aspects and features of using the Internet than we do, but rarely do they know or even think about anything regarding securing their own personal information and identity.
This week we did a lesson with sixth grade on using Facebook and other social networking websites.  The students were familiar with the workings of Facebook and helped me browse around my own site, but by a show of hands, less than half of them who have an account (which is about 65% of them), had ever visited, to their knowledge, the security section of Facebook to set up the security parameters.  This verified for us that the topic of our lesson was needed, but this is concerning.  My hope is that when students of any age 6-12 grades open a social networking account, that not only parents and adult family visit frequently, but that they also help with talking about and setting security parameters.  However, I visited many of the students' Facebook sites as a "non-friend" to discover that many of them are wide open to view and post. Scary.
We close our presentation telling the students that social networking sites are not bad, but sometimes bad people ruin good things.  They should use Facebook, Skype, Twitter and other social networking sites when their parents allow, but they must be smart about how they use them.  We highly recommend they talk with their parents about the security of their sites and encourage them to visit the security section of whatever site they use. "Go there today!" we say.  Just like everything else in education and working with kids, we know that several will not do anything.  Maybe because they think nothing bad will happen to them, maybe because they just forget in their busy day and minds, or maybe because they are not sure they really understand.  Hopefully, the lesson will get them to think about these issues and someday they will take action to protect themselves.