For those working on copyright in RHE 306 and interested in hip hop, there is an interesting article in the "New York Times" from last Sunday about the arrest of mixtape DJs, the Aphiliates, by Atlanta police for violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Law. The R.I.A.A. was involved in the arrest, though mixtapes are clearly part of the mainstream record industry, used by major labels to both "discover" and promote artists. Creative Commons is mentioned in the article. See "Hip Hop Outlaw (Industry Version)."

So Lawrence Lessig will be on campus next Tuesday (2/20), and he will be speaking at 7pm in Hogg Auditorium, which most of you know. Since RHE 306 students are required to attend, I assume that 306 instructors will want to build some class time around discussing his talk. This may take the form of set-up before the event or follow-up after the event.

In any case, I think we could help each other by sharing our ideas here on the blog. So if you’re planning to prepare for Lessig’s talk by discussing the text in advance, how do you plan to do so?

We've had a few posts of the court case between Carol Shloss and the James Joyce estate (here and here.) The case involves fair use laws and a whether or not Shloss can use certain materials in her book about Lucia Joyce (James Joyce's mentally ill daughter). Lawrence Lessig and some others at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society are helping out with the case, and Lessig reports that Shloss has "passed an important hurdle." It'll be interesting to see if they can successfully argue that Stephen Joyce (Joyce's grandson) is misusing his copyright privileges.

I thought this article on Google's online book project, in most recent "New Yorker," would be interesting to folks at the CWRL generally, but also specifically to those teaching Lessig, as it focuses on copyright lawsuits against the friendly giant.

It's that time again. Classes start on Tues, so what better time than now to try to reshape a syllabus? My experiment having students contribute to and actually write individual Wikipedia entries last semester rasied a lot of interesting issues for me and them. As an instructor, I became very interested in the issues surrounding intellectual property, intellectual collaboration, and how the former informs the latter, especially as students think about their work. A few of them were frustrated by the fact that publishing their work to Wikipedia meant that to a certain extent they were no longer the "author" in the way they conceived of it, and also many of them had their work taken down or worse yet not published to begin with, for a variety of reasons. I'm not repeating the assignment (though it was by far the most popular) for these and other reasons, but it get me thinking seriously about intellectual property issues.

Thought this article on Rosa Parks and copyright might be useful to those teaching Lessig this semester. It’s basically just a background of the debate over the ownsership of her image, so you'd probably have to do more research for a lesson plan, but it could might generate some conversation on its own. What I found most interesting is the fact that the marketing of Parks as an icon was an issue from the start--as a rallying point for the boycott and the Civil Rights Movement more broadly--rather than something Outkast started. Lastly, I would be interested to know how we might defend our own desire for a good groove against copyright litigation or the demand for political correctness. Can Big Boi's own rallying cry be just an innocent non sequitor: "Ah ha, hush that fuss / Everybody move to the back of the bus!" Or might we interpret the block party of the "Rosa Parks" video as a public demonstration in the tradition of Birmingham?

It seems that Lawrence Lessig is involved in a copyright case against Stephen Joyce, James Joyce's last surviving heir, who has been using the copyright on Joyce's works to harass academics.

Also, the publisher who holds the right to Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" is refusing to authorize new translations.

All,

I've produced an annotated bibliography containing references to thirty six resources that may be useful if you're teaching a class based on Free Culture. Most of them are op-ed pieces and other short arguments you might use in an assignment or for discussion material. See the attached HTML file.

Will Martin

EDIT: The Pedagogy Blog has kindly decided to attach a ".txt" file extension to the end of my HTML file, so when you click it you're going to get smacked between the eyes with a bunch of HTML instead of a usable resource. How irritating. I put a whole hour into turning that into a web page so you could just look at it.

Google is making a push to digitize a number of books with their Book Search. This could be a great controversy for those teaching Lessig this semester.

Here's a Washington Post editorial by Richard Ekman about why universities should support Google's efforts.

Here's another article on copyright for those teaching Lessig this year. It's from LA Weekly:

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/freedom-of-information/14244/