I am fairly sure that a lot of concepts in education have not been updated to the "Internet age":
o Does the student really have a license to record the professor's lecture in the first place? Just because a person has paid tuition, it does not mean that they do have a license to do anything they want with any specific presentation. I have paid to go to a lot of lectures where it says "no recording device allowed". Events where I speak often have me sign a form allowing them to put my presentations up on the web or re-distribute them. I am often asked if people can record my presentation and put it up on the web. I appreciate the request and usually grant it. Sometimes I ask that they not put an audio recording up on the web since I use a lot of sarcasm in my talks, and this could be construed in a way that I had not meant it. If the professors have not signed a release with the university, then they may "own" their presentations, or at least what happens to them beyond the individual and personal use by the individual student. o Does that license allow the student to broadcast that recorded lecture? In the days before the Internet the difficulty of an individual taking a recording and broadcasting it was high, so the incidence was low. People did not work into the agreements with the students what they could or could not do with the lectures they recorded. Most of the recordings that students made were just to help them fill out their notes. Sometimes students made recordings for fellow students that overslept or were working, but still you had to make copies to take it beyond one or two classmates. Now as it becomes easier and more frequent for people to put the recorded lectures on the Internet for distribution, the issue rises to the top. I could foresee a day where one student comes to the class (unfortunately scheduled at 0800 on a Saturday morning), records the class, and the other students simply listen to it later. Some professors might view this as a detriment, since it limits the interactiveness of the class. Others might view it as a good thing if the students were actually awake enough to listen to what was said, then discussed it on chat or in a wiki. In reality, I think that the university should record the lecture, and make it available on the web for the students....at least they would have more control over the actual content. o There are other issues. What happens with partial recordings, derived works, accreditation for the professor, etc.? What happens if the professor's lecture is taken out of context? It sounds to me as if this is a job for a Creative Commons(R) style of licensing. > I guess college students could be sued, why not? The RIAA can go after kids, > so the precedent has been set. If something strikes you as intuitively wrong > about this whole thing, you're not alone. If my son or daughter was going to a university that sued a student for making a recording of a lecture and pod-casting it, I would simply suggest to my child that perhaps they were at the wrong university, and should seek out one that is more progressive. I agree that it feels intuitively wrong, and even more wrong when you consider that the tuition that the student pays is only a small part of the cost of education. In a publicly funded institution, the tax payers pay the bulk of the costs, along with grants from industry. IMHO, the efforts of these professors belong to the public, since it is the public that pays their salaries. This is why I applaud the efforts of M.I.T., Rice University and others who have volunteered to put all of their materials up on the web and make them available to everyone. I have hopes that cool heads will prevail, and we should praise the progressive institutions and decry the draconian ones. md -- Jon "maddog" Hall Executive Director Linux International(R) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 80 Amherst St. Voice: +1.603.672.4557 Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A. WWW: http://www.li.org Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association (R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. (R)Linux International is a registered trademark in the USA used pursuant to a license from Linux Mark Institute, authorized licensor of Linus Torvalds, owner of the Linux trademark on a worldwide basis (R)UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the USA and other countries. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
