[Rumori] my tedious journey through the brave new copyright world

[stephen hastings-king]

list comrades!
i find myself getting pulled into a dispute over making audio material 
available via mp3 for the music classes i am teaching at the university 
level(for the moment, i shall be coy about which one--no reason for 
this really--perhaps coy is an end in itself) and am trying to sort out 
what is really going on behind the fear-of-the-riaa dimension.

the courses are a jazz history thing and one on experimental music 
since the 1950s. both are organized around a significant audio 
dimension, particularly the latter course, where that component serves 
as a kind of ear training--so the music needed to be available from the 
outset, and it should be technically--and the students should be able 
to listen to this music alot---but the university is freaked out by the 
possibility of the riaa suing them and as a result of this the means 
for making available is now a problem.  i am not the first person to 
use the net in this way here--but my particular problem is that i 
discovered that i am being used as a pilot program for the particular 
program i am working for, and this means both excessive visibility from 
the adminsitrative viewpoint and far more contact with the ambinet 
paranoia engendered by the brave new world of ip law.

  
i had been forced to create a website with password protection and 
streaming-only limits on access.  this was to sit on a server, one that 
would have been linked via the programme in the context of which i am 
working at the moment.  this would have been fine, but the university 
now says that i have to use their blackboard system, which they talk of 
as if it was an intranet site, but which is, in fact, the same as the 
other kind of site.  the questions that follow from this are:

1. what defines an educational use for copyrighted material?

2. following from this, are people who try to use the net as a medium 
for making audio material available for students running into trouble 
on copyright grounds?  is there any place to go for information about 
this kind of problem, so that one could get a sense of what the basis 
for such problems might be, how the law is shifting, etc.?

3. my suspicion is that the university is simply trying to justify 
having sunk alot of money into this goofy blackboard system--which has 
the advantage (from the university's standpoint) of making it quite 
difficult to transfer course content out of it if, say, you as a 
teacher switch universities.  in other words, blackboard functions as a 
way for the university of gather and maintain content of courses 
independently of the presence of a given teacher...but i cant tell if 
anything more is really at issue here, and so i turn to you folks to 
help me sort this out.

4. what are the alternatives?  i was going to ask the students to buy a 
bunch of cds, but even at a place like this one, there are limits to 
how much i can ask the students to pay for a given class--for example, 
the jazz class is using a textbook that has its virtues (mark gridley's 
jazz styles) most of which are counterbalanced by the extortionate 
price ($80.-)...library reserve might be an option, but it imposes real 
constraints on the utility of the music as a form of ear training...so 
these restrictions on access seem primarily as yet another pressure 
that reinforces the class divisions within a given student population...

anyway, my apologies if his is excessively narrow a question--it seems 
to have wider implications in principle--but there we are.

stephen

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