Archive for February 2nd, 2009

Since coming to college, I’ve taken a keen interest in how intellectual property effects higher education. One of the best bloggers in that arena is Duke’s Kevin Smith on their Scholarly Communications blog. His recent post about copyright brings up a great point:

“The second point that seems significant to me is the complaint sometimes heard about the DMCA and the ruling in the dancing baby case that it has created too great a burden on the content companies for them to have to evaluate the possibility of fair use before they send a takedown notice.  Although I understand the argument that a business needs to streamline those processes that merely protect profits and do not generate them, it is hard to be too sympathetic when, in the higher education environment, we are called on to make many decisions about fair use every day, usually without recourse to a stable of lawyers.  The law of fair use is intentionally, and I think correctly, open-ended and flexible; it does not lend itself to streamlined or automated processes precisely so that it can remain useful as new innovations and technologies come along.  The burden of having to make individual fair use decisions is shared by users and content creators alike; it may not be efficient, but in the end the social benefit of doing things this way clearly outweigh the costs.”

It is the conceit of the large content industries to think they are entitled to certain profits, especially when more laudable professions, like higher education, do not receive the same benefits that the content industries believe they deserve.

As some of you may know, I founded the Georgetown University chapter of Students for Free Culture. One of the main tasks has been to raise awareness about free culture on a campus where it is little considered. This blog post, via Fred Benenson, eloquently explains why that task matters:

“There is a common assumption that light pollution affects only astronomers, and a similar assumption that copyright affects only content owners and pirates. This is obviously not the case. And while these issues are not directly observed on a day-to-day basis, they are degrading our shared commons at a rapid pace. Environmentalists, for their part, have done an exemplary job over the past two decades at making the ecological problems we face palpable, a task helped ironically by the mercurial temperament and apocalyptic manifestations of nature at large. Those in the free culture movement could work towards the same – articulating to a mainstream the need for as rich a cultural commons as we desire a natural commons. Until this is fully achieved the public domain, like darkness, will become increasingly a memory, a fabled past still in our collective conscious but no longer a true reality.”