The university doesn’t occupy a unique structural position, but it is an example par excellence of an institution with a history and tradition and discipline that justify different treatment precisely because of the good that they clearly have done and clearly can do either despite or because of (take your pick) their existence at the margins of the arms’ length market. There are a lot of ways to characterize this more precisely. One contemporary example would be to argue that the university is an example of Benkler’s social production.

Examples of what I mean by ways in which market-basec content industries could or should defer to the university in copyright terms? Film is a clear one; the Register of Copyright’s most recent DMCA rulemaking recognizes that. Easing or eliminating clearance burdens for projects such at MIT’s OpenCourseware project is a second. Simplifying clearance problems for academic publishers and their authors would be third. Clarifying fair use parameters for use of copyrighted material in classroom teaching would be fourth. I could go on.

Where are the concrete examples of the type of ethical concessions you’re seeking (such as letting universities use movies)? And why do universities, themselves caught up in a dog-eat-dog rankings arms race, merit better treatment than, say, a random autodidact?

Mackenzie Wark has some thoughts on the growing structural similarity between institutions of higher education and the job markets they serve:

“Education is organized as a prestige market, in which a
few scarce qualifications provide entree to the highest paid
work, and everything else arranges itself in a pyramid of
prestige and price below. Scarcity infects the subject with
desire for education as a thing that confers a magic ability
to gain a “salary” with which to acquire still more things.
Through the instrument of scarcity and the hierarchical rationing of education, workers are persuaded to see education much as the ruling class would have them see it–as a privilege.” (Gamer Theory)