An article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Ed reports on the copyright infringement case pending against Georgia State University.  Basically a group of publishers charge that Georgia State is allowing copyrighted materials to be used on course web sites in a manner that exceed the fair use doctrine.  The university’s defense is that they provided guidelines to faculty on copyright rules, and relied on the individuals to police themselves.  Therefore the university is technically not at fault.  Maybe true, and it looks like the court decision will come soon.  But what surprised me is the publisher’s statements on the faculty role.

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While I’m on summertime travel please enjoy this re-post from the Rodeworks archive.  Magnatune continues to be a significant presence in online music distribution, and proof that open access, free delivery and pay-what-you-will can be a successful business model. Read the rest of this entry »

I have often advocated for an easing of copyright restrictions, and wider adoption of Creative Commons licensing for content.   And for those who create content to share, or for content with little-to-no current commercial value, this makes sense.  But I will concede that there is a limited class of content that continues to have commercial value which generates benefits for the artists and/or their families.  Take the recent case of J.D. Salingers’s Catcher in the Rye, and the lawsuit over an updating of Holden Caufield in a new book.  In a nutshell a new author has written a story with Holden as an old man, and the Salinger estate has cried copyright infringement.

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Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Build a Digital Republic of Their Own, by David Bollier, The New Press, 2008 — http://www.onthecommons.org.

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Most technology users care little about the particulars of software they use — they just want it to stay our of their way and work.  If people profess an opinion about something as mundane as an operating system — Mac or Windows — they are probably responding more to a social and branding identity than to the relative technical merits.  So as a person who recommends and distribute technology solutions what does open source software offer me?  If my users don’t care why should I?

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Why is the Creative Commons idea important?  What is Creative Commons?  I’m not sure I can give it to you in a twitter-like 140 characters, but I’ll try for the elevator speech.  Did you know that under current US copyright law and content you post on the internet is automatically copyrighted?  In fact anything you publish in some fixed format is automatically copyrighted, whether you actually intend to copyright it or not.  But what if you want to encourage people to use your ideas, expand on them, and use them to build new ideas/artwork/music or whatever type of creative expression?  Enter Creative Commons.

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