Monday, October 24, 2005

The importance of asserting fair use rather than asking permission, Tarleton Gillespie, Between What’s Right and What’s Easy, Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2005: Sometimes our tools are our politics, and that’s not always a good thing. Last week, the Copyright Clearance Center announced that it would integrate a ‘Copyright Permissions Building Block’ function directly into Blackboard’s course management tools. The service automates the process of clearing copyright for course materials [...] If [...] fair use is a protection of free speech and academic freedom that deliberately allow certain uses without permission, then the CCC/Blackboard plan raises a significant problem. [...] Faculty and their universities should be at the forefront of the push for a more robust fair use, one that affirmatively protects ‘multiple copies for classroom use’ when their distribution is noncommercial, especially as getting electronic readings to students is becoming ever cheaper and more practical. Automating the clearance process undoes the possibility of...challenging this slow disintegration of fair use. (Via Open Access News.) Yet another reason to avoid Blackboard's "closed garden." I've never regretted hiring clever undergraduates to build my course site, including automatic homework submission and validation and discussion groups. 10:34:21 PM