A couple of years ago, our Director of Legal Affairs Kirsi Salmela presented the pedagogical entity Kopiraittila at an international meeting of copyright organisations. This gave our Spanish sister organisation CEDRO the idea to complement their previous projects on intellectual property rights with Kopiraittila, which provides educational material on copyright for educational institutions.
Later, the material available at Kopiraittila was reviewed in more detail together with CEDRO. In addition to this, CEDRO was introduced to the technical implementation of the website. CEDRO’s experts were convinced that the website would complement their range of training programmes and materials for educational institutions and that the website could also be implemented in Spanish.
“It was not only a matter of translating the content from Finnish to Spanish, but also of adapting the content to Spanish legislation, culture and educational context,” says Carmen Cuartero López, the Director of Marketing, Communications and Institutional Relations at CEDRO.
Carmen Cuartero López, the Director of Marketing, Communications and Institutional Relations is in charge of Aula de Recho de Autor Photo: CEDRO
Spain has four official languages, all of which are also used in teaching. For this reason, Aula del Derecho de Autor has also been translated into Catalan, Galician and Basque.
CEDRO has agreed with Kopiosto on the rights to use the images and other content and on the implementation of the Spanish version of the website. “We launched this project early this year and it has been very interesting. We have gone through the content together, adapting it to match the Spanish legislation and educational world,” Salmela says. The technical implementation was carried out by the Finnish design and digital agency J&Co Digital.
Raising awareness of copyright
CEDRO’s goal is to help the educational community to understand the different alternatives that copyright provides for the responsible use of protected contents. CEDRO also wants to highlight the reasons why copyright is valuable. In Cuartero López’s opinion, Kopiraittila fits in perfectly with other training programmes developed by CEDRO.
“Just like the original Kopiraittila website, Aula del Derecho de Autor is user-friendly and very easy to integrate into education. It will help raise awareness of copyright-related matters among schools, teachers and educational leaders,” Cuartero López says.
According to Cuartero López, the best thing about Kopiraittila is that its content and methods are customised for pupils in different grades. Another great thing about Kopiraittila is the use of different material types: it includes everything from videos to games and texts.
CEDRO will soon present Aula del Derecho de Autor to various organisers of education in Spain. The aim is to get educational institutions to adopt the new service.
According to Cuartero López, teaching copyright in Spain is a challenge and an opportunity. Some progress has been made in recent years, although one fundamental step remains to be taken.
“It is essential that the public administrations act as promoters and examples of respect for the intellectual property rights set out in the law. We believe that Aula del Derecho de Autor is a tool that will help us achieve this goal,” states Cuartero López.