Veterans of the campus file-sharing wars, and folks interested in copyright and fair-use doctrine, should be familiar with the work of Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University who has argued strongly for copyright reform. Tomorrow Ms. Seltzer will deliver two lectures at Cornell University, and the institution will offer streaming video of both talks on its Web site.
The first session, “Protecting the University From Copyright Bullies,” at 3 p.m., will explore whether colleges can meet their own principles of academic freedom while enforcing current copyright laws. The second talk, “Righting the Copyright Balance,” at 7:30 p.m., will propose changes to existing copyright law and to the entertainment industry’s distribution models.
Both lectures should offer plenty of food for thought, and some pointed perspectives. Ms. Seltzer was formerly a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has opposed the entertainment industry in court and in public debate. And in an editorial for The Harvard Crimson, she argued that colleges should do more to fight “the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us.” —Brock Read
3 Responses to Cornell U. Prepares a Pair of Webcasts on Copyright
dank48 - April 19, 2012 at 8:35 am
What a terrific summary of the situation. Lots of information in a very brief space.
And, almost in passing, there’s an observation about university presses that imo it would be difficult to improve upon: “. . . in academe if work has value for some, it’s reason enough to publish.”
In today’s climate, of course university presses have to be run in a businesslike manner to stay in business, but that doesn’t mean running them “like a business” in the sense of caring more about the bottom line than about what they’re publishing. Balancing the mission and the economic aspects is a hell of a trick. You’d almost think people had a calling or something.
sand6432 - April 19, 2012 at 9:12 am
For all the reasons you cite here, the best solution is neither the publisher’s site nor the author’s but instead the university library’s, either at the author’s institution of the press’s parent institution, because only the library is in a position to ensure a permanent URL, proper file updating, etc. This is one of the benefits that presses that become administrative parts of their universities’ libraries realize through that association, as the press did in setting up the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing at Penn State jointly with the library in 2005.—Sandy Thatcher
gavin_moodie - April 21, 2012 at 12:11 am
I agree. A journal article referred readers to the author’s research centre’s web site for material which was incidental to the article but central to my interest. Of course the url was no longer current, even tho the article was published only in 2009. I eventually tracked down the site, but am still not confident that I found the material the author was relying on.
At least in Australia, most universities’ open digital repositories tend to be hosted by the library, which is another example of libraries remaking themselves for the digital era.