Copies, Copying, Copyright and Copy Wrongs

One issue that often confronts us is whether and how to use materials what we've discovered in our work. In the course of recently responding to an e-mail on this question, I wrote...

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The Leadership Challenge licenses their materials for use by other organizations at a cost of something like $100 to $200 per participant.

You can contact them at www.leadershipchallenge.com for information.

Use of this material also requires attending a training program which costs about $3,000

If your budget won't accommodate this kind of costs, there is nothing to prevent you from developing your own material/learning tasks loosely based on their content.

What is in view here is the concept of "fair use" which is an aspect of US Copyright law. (Not to be confused with the commonly known practice of "copy things right".)

One difficulty is finding out what the honest parameters of fair use actually are. Organizations who produce materials that might be duplicated don't want you to know that there is such a thing as the "fair use" provision so they will tell you it does not exist.

On the other hand, people who want to use anything they can find on the Internet or elsewhere without payment, acknowledgement or permission assume that until they get stopped there is no problem.

The government seems reluctant to issue guidelines for the "fair use" of copyrighted materials, preferring to operate on a "case-by-case" basis. This practice is also known as the "copyright lawyer full employment act" provision.

Those who have ventured to extrapolate principles or guidelines from case law end up with questions like:

1. Will the material be used in "not-for-profit" settings?

2. What percentage of the original material is used?

3. Will the material be used in face-to-face instructional settings?

4. In what country will the material be used? (U.S. copyright law is sometimes different from international copyright law.)

5. Is exact representation of the original material used, or just the general sense of a concept?

6. Are you talking with people who are trainers, or people who are lawyers?

It would be great if some Christian organizations could get together and come up with something like Christian musicians have done where an organization could pay a fee of $100 to $500 per year to get an overall license for using copyrighted materials throughout their organization. It would provide payment to the copyright holders, but also put the use of materials at a level that organizations could afford.

Flash Mobs, Body of Christ and Mission Leader Training

Today’s Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

Today, Jeannie sent me a link to a flash mob video from a store in Canada. I had read about flash mobs, but was not aware of the video files that show some of their more public venures, singing, dancing and freeze action posing in a public place.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was isn’t this an amazing picture of the function of the Body of Christ in the world. One of my mentors, Pastor Ray Stedman, talked about the Kingdom of God as “God’s secret government of the earth.”

So when I see dozens or hundreds of seemingly normal people, in a very public venue, in the middle of their daily activities, suddenly breaking into a choral rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus, it quickly becomes obvious that they have a different agenda, and are responding to different cues, on a different timetable than others around them.

But isn’t this what we are supposed to be doing every day, all day? Not singing or dancing (at least not for people like me) but going about my daily schedule with a different agenda, a different purpose, responding to different cues, and looking for a different response?

Of course, I couldn’t go far without reflecting on how this kind of technique might be used on some of our training events. For example, use a prepared role play which would emerge naturally from a session with no introduction or instruction that would make it appear to be anything other than part of the dialogue in a session. Or have three or four people, at a particular point in the session, again with no introduction or announcement, stand and read something aloud in unison. (that might even wake up some of the people in the class).

Well that little bit of output has probably used up all my creative juices for the week. I think it’s time for a nap.

Drucker: Beware the Undoable Job

What implications does this have for ministry job descriptions?

 

Beware the Undoable Job

from What's Best Next by Matt

Drucker:


“[The effective executive is] forever on guard against the ‘impossible’ job, the job that simply is not for normal human beings.


Such jobs are common. They usually look exceedingly logical on paper. But they cannot be filled. One man of proven performance capacity after the other is tried — and none does well. Six months or a year later, the job has defeated them.


Almost always such a job was first created to accomodate an unusual man tailored to his idiosyncrasies. It usually calls for a mixture of temperaments that is rarely found in one person. Individuals can acquire very divergent kinds of knowledge and highly disparate skills. But they cannot change their temperaments. A job that calls for disparate temperaments becomes an “undoable” job, a man-killer.


The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.


(From The Effective Executive)