Category: Copyright

This Course Brought to You By…


This Course Brought to You By…. (Inside Higher Ed)

Here’s an interesting story about a university course with some pretty blatant corporate ties:

[The] IACC [International Anticounterfeiting Coalition] sponsor[ed] a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real.

I can almost understand how this might have seemed like a good lesson for the students of a course to learn a new marketing tactic, but it’s a bit fishy that they 1) received $10,000 from the organization, and 2) received materials to teach from. As an instructor, this is perhaps the most egregious thing–that the classroom became a pulpit for the IACC to present their view to paying students. It doesn’t sound as though critically engaging the issue of counterfeiting (or guerrilla marketing) was a part of the course at all.

Generational Divide or an Age Gap

The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality – New York Times

David Pogue’s informal experiment on differences in perceptions of what types of copying are “wrong” is a good, quick summary of how younger folks more permissive views. Pogue attributes the difference to the “generational divide” where “the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*.”

The divide he describes between younger people are more accustomed to technologies that make copying easy and those of us who are used to rules bound  to traditional media certainly plays a part. But this isn’t really anything new… young people have been making mix tapes and trading records for years. It might be that wanting to share media is something that is a part of the growing up, personality forming process. How many mix tapes have you made since you were 20?

Copyright in Canada, Wireless at Home

Good stuff from Google and their employees today…

The Canadians Again Show us how to do things

William Patry offers a great summary of the sentiment of the Canadian public in the outcry over their version of the DMCA. While I had heard that Michael Geist had been speaking out to a great degree against it, I did not realize how much public support he generated.

That the public would become so involved in the issue, especially under the direction [too strong of a word, I know] of a public intellectual like Geist, really has me thinking. I wonder things like: what was more influential in forming these opinions against the new law, what the law actually said or what Geist said the impact might be? Would there have been such an outcry without some specific person leading the cause?

Today: TV static. Tomorrow: broadband.

The Google policy blog also announced their membership in the “Wireless Innovation Alliance,” which is made up of a variety of familiar names. I had not yet heard about this group, but it’s nice to see that they are basing their arguments, at least in part, off of research into what the technology might be capable of.