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

[David meme]

If you are ever teaching electronica or post-rock forms our tracks on 
http://www.locarecords.com/downloads.html are licensed for you to use 
without fear. But this might also be useful.. 
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61173,00.html



On 5 Feb 2004, at 15:10, stephen hastings-king wrote:

> 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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