GearBits

Putting the Copyright Fear into Colleges

Techdirt has a nice blurb about Ithaca College's new policy instructing professors to no longer use any content on the basis of "fair use," a well-established and perfectly valid loophole in our current morass of copyright law.

"While most such course packs do involve some approved material, much of it is often used on a fair-use basis - but university administrators are afraid of getting sued. Thus, they're going to tell professors that they need to license every last bit of content they use. This means that (a) professors will ditch a lot of materials, because they don't have time to get approval from everyone or because the publisher wants too much money to include a single paragraph and (b) the course packs will be much more expensive with less useful stuff for students."

Just today, I dropped off a huge coursepack full of copyrighted materials to our local bookstore for duplication and sale to my students next quarter. 18 out of 22 items in the coursepack will require authorization and the addition of some licensing/reprinting fee passed onto the students.

While I totally agree that creators of content should get paid for the use/enjoyment of that content, there needs to be a better way. Tracking down the 6 to 8 copyright holders of the materials in just my coursepack alone will take someone at the bookstore half a day, I'd imagine. If there were a better system in place, it could be done quicker and cheaper than it is now. Who knows...maybe if Congress stopped extending copyrights and instead paid more attention to how they should be operationalized, we'd all be better off.

[Hmm...I hope my quoting that Techdirt article falls under fair use.]