There are many different ways to share the content of your presentation slides, but Slideshare has remained my ‘go to’ slide repository, as it aggregates all my presentations that I have chosen to share in the last eight years. Time warp almost!  These days so much goes on in social sharing processes that it’s easy to miss changes or updates.

Thanks to Ian Clark in his post on Slideshare closes copyright breaching loophole, I discovered a new service launched by Slideshare. It’s a highly relevant one related to images – a topic I always make sure to cover with any students that I engage with using images for social media professional or personal use.  I do this in the context of getting away from ‘death by powerpoint’ and moving to visual prompts to communicate, with limited/appropriate text etc. The slide-deck needs to be standalone, but also cannot (nor should it) reveal the depth of conversations had. It’s not  a lecture! So information rich and informative – tick.  Images – tick. Creative commons – tick.  Correct content attribution – tick.

I make it my business to use Alan Levine’s FlickrCC attribution helper as my totally favourite and only sane way for a busy person to get fab images, use creative commons, and meet copyright needs (as a way of acknowledging the creative work of others).  NO snitching!

I place the URL on each image page  – the simplest thing, and now the best thing to do, given the launch of Slideshare’s new clipping feature. Introducing clipping on Slideshare:

There’s so much information at our fingertips today – on LinkedIn SlideShare alone there are 18 million pieces of content. As a result, it can be hard to stay on top of everything that resonates with you. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our newest feature, Clipping,  a new tool designed to make it easier for you to conduct and organize research, and learn any topic quickly on LinkedIn SlideShare. You can now clip and save the best slides from presentations across LinkedIn SlideShare to view or share later. It’s is a handy way to keep everything organized in topic-based Clipboards. You can also share your great finds to benefit the whole community. Here’s how it works. As you’re combing through decks, you’ll notice a clipping icon in the bottom left corner of slides. So, if there’s one slide that you absolutely love, you can clip it. When you’re ready, head to your board, where all of the the individual slides you clipped will be saved. You can organize clips into boards based on topic or author. Once you’ve created a great board, you can share it with others or post it on social media.

So here’s the rub.  I’ve always made my Slideshare’s downloadable – in the spirit of being open, and making information accessible.  Sure, people can  do sneaky things with that download, but it’s a balance.

But this snip and make a new deck is a whole new bit of chicanery, as well as an issue of copyright.

There is no integrity associated with cutting and pasting other people’s creative and/or academic ideas and palming them off as your own – and this is what I fear this new Slideshare option allows. Also, if you don’t have the attribution of an image used in the actual slide (some people list them all at the end, or I add it first time used) you are also breaching the spirit of creative commons sharing processes.

This new Slideshare feature needs you to actively change a setting on each and evey presentation individually (it’s not defaulted to the option that protects you from a copyright claim). As Ian explains:

To prevent your slides from being clipped simply take the following steps.

1. Click on “Edit” underneath the slide player:

2. Head to “Privacy Settings” and select “No” to allowing users to clip slides:

Ye gad – what a process – and how many of us have missed this important update??  Well there it is – now go off and get clicking!

Image: flickr photo shared by Skley under a Creative Commons ( BY-ND ) license