That's what the Copyright Alliance was doing yesterday with its first academic symposium, "Copyright and the University."  The half-day event was by all accounts a big success. We had a couple of changes in the line-up; Ric Keller and Cheryl Elzy both found themselves unable to get into town, so Marybeth Peters did the keynote Warren Arbogast filled in for Cheryl. Marybeth was great, and both panels were really animated, but in a constructive, respectful way.

Two major themes emerged from the discussion. The first involved the problem of P2P on college campuses, how to reduce it, and who is responsible. One point of consensus emerged; more education needs to be done on the merits of copyright in K-2 and also when they reach the college campus. Nathan Perry, a senior at the University of Utah (and our intern this semester) said he had never received any messages about copyright at U of Utah, not from the computer administrators or from the professors in his journalism or film classes.

This is the mission of the Copyright Alliance — education. Critics will charge that what we produce for the K-12 crowd will be corporate propaganda, but even if we were inclined to do that (and what is corporate propaganda anyway?) it wouldn't be embraced by teachers or appreciated by students. No, we want to have a comprehensive approach that celebrates the creative process, and that includes fair use.

Fair use leads me to the other theme of the symposium, namely difficulties professors report in trying to obtain permission to use copyrighted works in class. In my opening remarks, I addressed that problem by proposing a "green light-amber light" wiki on the Copyright Alliance web site where a professor could post a question and a copyright owner could answer, essentially promising not to sue over that use. Then other professors with similar uses could tell their general counsels that they wouldn't get sued either. It's a way to reduce transaction costs and free up more works for use in the classroom. It was summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The one criticism that emerged from the plan is that this permission approach would somehow stifle fair use. It is true that there are classroom uses that are fair use; in fact, "education" is in the statute. What is also true is that the professors currently frustrated because they can't get someone to sign off on their use obviously don't think of their use as fair use; they wouldn't be seeking permission otherwise. This whole system is initiated by a professor's request. Those requests exist now, all we're trying to do is look for a way to answer them more efficiently (or in the case of the professor who sees his use already approved for another professor on the wiki, eliminate queries entirely).

There isn't a whole lot of trust between the creative works industries and the higher ed community; at least, that was the message I kept receiving yesterday. It's fortunate I'm naive and strongly respect both communities or I wouldn't have held this symposium. But what a number of academics told me yesterday was that this program was different; it had healthy dialogue and mutual respect. I was encouraged by several professors — including some not as bullish on copyright as others — to take it around the country to other universities and to conferences of educators to try to further the rapproachment. I need to figure out exactly how we'd do that, but I know I want to keep the dialogue alive, not just on the "green light-amber light" but on the notion of reducing hostilities between these communities, both of which contribute so richly to our culture. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 10:05 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, education, fair use, p2p. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.