ORIGINAL POST: Hi friends- a word on Amazon Inspire.
My husband and I have read about it and have had several thoughtful discussions. Like so many teachers, we are experts at Googling and finding resources for our classrooms. We share materials willingly and present at many workshops, always giving away our materials to participants. Yet, we also have built a business, Barraug Books and Curriculum, where we sell our copyrighted materials. We don’t use lessons that other teachers have shared with us. What we sell is our unique brand of lessons with links to resources and handcrafted supporting materials made on our own time. We use a home computer to separate our business from our workplace and if we use our own materials in our classes, we email them to ourselves as PDFs so we are not using our workplace technology.
I requested a Beta invite to Amazon Inspire to make sure our copyrighted intellectual property has not been uploaded to the Amazon website. Napster was shut down because musicians’ intellectual copyrights were being violated. Pirate Bay, as well. I have yet to receive the invite.
If you have materials from us either shared, purchased, or even our freebies, please do not upload them to Amazon Inspire. When you purchase or download a freebie from www.teacherspayteachers.com you have purchased/ downloaded one single user license for the material in your own classroom.
We might consider uploading our materials ourselves to Amazon Inspire or if Amazon Inspire offers a premium area where we can sell our products cross-platform, we might consider this as well. We are supportive of open source and believe that any opportunity to make teachers’ lives easier is a good thing … usually. However, there are already uploads to Amazon Inspire that include massive copyright infringements. The work of a kindergarten teacher, Deanna Jump, was found on the Amazon Inspire Beta. This product includes her whole year kindergarten curriculum she sells for $200+ on TPT listed for free on Amazon Inspire with a thank you to her for having created it. She has a disabled brother and uses the proceeds of her intellectual work to take care of him.
Most products on TPT sell for less than $10. A typical product in our store is $4 or $5. Support teacherpreneurs, clip artists, writers, and creative people who are just trying to get a little money back for their creative efforts! Teaching is a calling but we shouldn’t have our work stolen from us.
Thanks! Debbie
Revision after Amazon Inspire removed copyrighted material: But still … how does Amazon Inspire know if uploaded materials are copyrighted unless teacher-authors painstakingly search for their products or iterations of their products. Were there any teachers on this startup venture to discuss intellectual property or copyright?