北海道釧路町立富原小学校にて「著作権授業」を開催致しました September.12.2014

On September 12, 2014, Japan and International Motion Picture Copyright Association (JIMCA) conducted a Copyright Class for sixth-graders at Tomihara Elementary School in Kushiro-Cho, Hokkaido. A JIMCA representative served as a lecturer, and a student from the Graduate School of Education, Waseda University assisted the lessons as a facilitator.

The Copyright Class consisted of two lessons – a quiz session and group discussion – for which two school periods were assigned. During the first lesson, a quiz rally – “Is this real or fake?” – children tackled six quizzes to determine the authenticity of goods such as DVDs of popular movies and toys portraying favored characters from animated shows. Since familiar goods were used for the quiz session, children genuinely enjoyed tackling the challenges, and some of the children even came up with perfect answers to all the questions.

In the second lesson, each class engaged in group discussions regarding the type of copyright issues that elementary students might encounter. A case study proposed was – “I secretly entered my friend’s drawing for a contest. The work was selected for the Best Work Award, for which a prize was awarded to the friend.” The students were asked whether this would be a problem according to the Copyright Law, and the question “What situations would qualify as copyright infringement?” was actively debated.

Many opinions such as “Since the person, who secretly sent the drawing, doesn’t gain any benefit, there shouldn’t be any problem, should there?” were given by the students. Lastly, the lecturer from JIMCA, provided a basic explanation on copyright matters. During a Q&A session at the end of the lesson, a great number of questions were asked by the students, including: “What is going to happen to the copyright, if the creator dies?”, “What kinds of actions are considered a violation of copyright?” etc.

Deputy Head Teacher Masayuki Takahata said, “Both children and adults are now much more aware about the value of copyrighted works that we usually come in contact with. It appears that many children thought benefiting monetarily was the only way one could violate another person’s copyright. I believe the students were able to understand that copyright infringements do occur regardless of whether or not a benefit is gained.”
Although copyright education is included in the government curriculum guidelines, some schools still have difficulty incorporating it. In order to introduce the idea of respecting intellectual property rights as well as copyright to young generations, JIMCA has visited a number of elementary schools in different parts of Japan and conducted the “Copyright Classes”, annually for five to six schools since 2011.