http://madisonian.net/2005/10/24/more-on-ccc-and-blackboard/ a blog about law, tech, culture, and related things Thu, 10 May 2012 20:32:56 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://madisonian.net/2005/10/24/more-on-ccc-and-blackboard/comment-page-1/#comment-223846 More on IP and the University at madisonian.net: a weblog about law, technology, and society Mon, 18 Jun 2007 01:47:28 +0000 http://madisonian.net/?p=391#comment-223846 [...] Kate Torrey’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on copyright and the contemporary university instructor provides a handy introduction to the legal problems facing classroom teachers today.  Unfortunately, the piece offers a crabbed view of possible solutions.  (Thanks, Frank, for the pointer.)  More below the jump.Of course, the Chronicle piece is itself available only to Chron subscribers, and in the context of a paean to “the essential core of scholarly communications,” that irony is not lost on her academic audience.   So I’ll summarize the key points; the complexities and uncertainties of fair use prevent me from doing more.  She argues:  A growing number of college and university instructors are using Blackboard and similar password-protected course management tools to manage electronic course reserves, rather than producing paper coursepacks or using library-administered electronic reserves.  Those instructors are already perplexed by the limits of fair use as it pertains to teaching-related reproduction and distribution of copyrighted scholarly text.  Blackboard and its ilk enables those instructors to hide their troubles behind password protection, rather than encouraging them to clear rights through Copyright Clearance Center.  (She seems unaware, by the way, of legal and technological connections between CCC and Blackboard.  See this page on the CCC site.)  Her solutions: Sophisticated online help should be made available to faculty members and TA’s. Help desks on permissions, with knowledgeable staff members, should be put in place. Student fees should include some portion of permissions costs, just as they do for printing and technology. And universities must invest in their presses’ ability to make material available for digital use in courses. Finally, the Copyright Clearance Center, which provides copyright-licensing services worldwide, can play a critical role here. The CCC, on behalf of universities, and with course-enrollment and usage statistics provided by them, could operate a course-management permissions system, with modest fees that would acknowledge that universities were acting in good faith. [...] [...] Kate Torrey’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on copyright and the contemporary university instructor provides a handy introduction to the legal problems facing classroom teachers today.  Unfortunately, the piece offers a crabbed view of possible solutions.  (Thanks, Frank, for the pointer.)  More below the jump.Of course, the Chronicle piece is itself available only to Chron subscribers, and in the context of a paean to “the essential core of scholarly communications,” that irony is not lost on her academic audience.   So I’ll summarize the key points; the complexities and uncertainties of fair use prevent me from doing more.  She argues:  A growing number of college and university instructors are using Blackboard and similar password-protected course management tools to manage electronic course reserves, rather than producing paper coursepacks or using library-administered electronic reserves.  Those instructors are already perplexed by the limits of fair use as it pertains to teaching-related reproduction and distribution of copyrighted scholarly text.  Blackboard and its ilk enables those instructors to hide their troubles behind password protection, rather than encouraging them to clear rights through Copyright Clearance Center.  (She seems unaware, by the way, of legal and technological connections between CCC and Blackboard.  See this page on the CCC site.)  Her solutions: Sophisticated online help should be made available to faculty members and TA’s. Help desks on permissions, with knowledgeable staff members, should be put in place. Student fees should include some portion of permissions costs, just as they do for printing and technology. And universities must invest in their presses’ ability to make material available for digital use in courses. Finally, the Copyright Clearance Center, which provides copyright-licensing services worldwide, can play a critical role here. The CCC, on behalf of universities, and with course-enrollment and usage statistics provided by them, could operate a course-management permissions system, with modest fees that would acknowledge that universities were acting in good faith. [...]

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