From the monthly archives: June 2009

Openness and academic values

On June 26, 2009 By

An interesting controversy arose recently at San Jose State University, when a professor objected to the fact that one of his students posted source code he had written as part of some class assignments onto the web.  Amazingly, the professor claimed that sharing this code was tantamont to plagiarism, since it made the student’s work [...]

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Words having meanings, but money talks.

On June 23, 2009 By

The overheated rhetoric employed by the big content industries in their futile and probably suicidal battle against file sharing has been very detrimental to any hope for an improved understanding of copyright and intellectual property.  For example, in an age when real piracy has once again become an international concern, the use of term “piracy” [...]

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Fair use, by comparision

On June 17, 2009 By

Fair use is a uniquely American concept, in spite of its recent inclusion in the national copyright laws of Japan and Israel.  In the US, after all, it is a common law doctrine that was developed by judges, intent on mitigating the most unfair applications of the copyright monopoly, for over 120 years before it [...]

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Peer review and open access

On June 12, 2009 By

Several different events have focused my attention recently on the relationship between open access initiatives and peer review.  First, a new task force on “digital futures” at Duke met for the first time yesterday, and it became clear very quickly that this group sees an open access initiative as its first task.  The group, [...]

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New (and not so new) resources

On June 2, 2009 By

I am delighted to be able to link to a whole new group of resource for understanding and teaching others about copyright law and user rights.  Since most of these resources are video, they offer a nice supplement to the text resources I have listed here and here.

First, because it is the [...]

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