Earlier this year Congress passed a Higher Ed reauthorization bill that, among other things, encouraged colleges and universities receiving federal support to develop plans to target illegal downloading and uploading of creative works on university networks and to promote legal alternatives, a move we promoted and praised. This issue has been ongoing at the state level too, however, with the most momentum, not surprisingly, where large numbers of people rely on copyright to make a living. Tennessee is one such state.

Tennessee’s governor signed into law yesterday a crackdown on university piracy that mirrors in many ways the higher ed language, but likely will have more teeth given that many prominent places of higher learning in Tennessee are in fact state-owned institutions.

Some universities in Tennessee have already been pursuing creative ways of approaching student education. We found with our academic symposium last year and in other ways that many universities never mention one single thing about possible infringement on campus networks. That is not the case with Vanderbilt University, which informs its students upon arrival on campus as freshmen. But it doesn’t stop there. It brings in songwriters and authors and other creators to discuss what copyright means to them, and also operates a first-year seminar class where students work to develop new legal distribution models for creative works.

The Copyright Alliance is busy developing K-12 materials in conjunction with an educational group and school districts to help teachers work copyright education into their course discussions, and we host links to many quality programs for K-16 on our web site. This is important, because as well-intentioned as higher-education institutions like Vanderbilt may be, it’s tough to turn around an 18-teen-year-old who is set in her ways. (I’ve been working on my 13-year-old since she was around 8, and my 10-year-old since around 5). Still, I applaud the efforts that higher education institutions are making and were making even before passage of legislation. It’s only appropriate that educators educate their students on the law, and on lawful use of university-owned facilities.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 11:18 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, education, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.