Lecture Copyright

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

Here’s a gem from Techdirt about a professor that is suing someone for selling notes of his lecture.  He is claiming he has a copyright on what he says in class and someone else can’t take his ideas, write them down in outline form and sell them for profit.

Apparently this is an actual business in large campus communities.  Einstein Notes seems to be all over Florida.  They show up in lectures, take notes and then sell those notes to students who cannot make it to class.

The lecturer claims what he says is protected by copyright.  I don’t know if that is factual.  Nothing is protected by copyright law unless it is fixed.  Unless the professor is reading his lecture word for word from a piece of paper, I doubt his lecture meets the minimal requirement of what it takes to protect a work.

Let’s suppose he has written down his lecture and is reading it word for word during class.  Facts, ideas, systems and methods of operation are not protected by copyright.  I have to believe most of the lecture will contain elements of this type and not the instructor’s personal poetry or musical works.

How many times have you witnessed someone using a personal recording device to record a lecture?  If writing notes constitutes copyright infringement, recording that same lecture is certainly against the law.

Maybe we should all transfer to MIT.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/

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News

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

I’m from Google and my wife is from Yahoo.  Yet we both get the same headlines every day.  Actually she has Yahoo as her start page while I use Protopage as mine.  Her news is right there in Yahoo.  Mine comes from RSS feeds at places like Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine and assorted blogs.

Yet we both get the same headlines every day.

I don’t watch the news on television, so I don’t know for sure they are running the same stories.  My guess is, they are.  Apparently there are only twenty headline-worthy stories in the world each day, and everyone picks them up.

The same is true of the blogs I read.  If anything comes out in educational technology, someone picks it up in Twitter (which I’m still having a hard time grasping).  Then a few people blog about what they saw in Twitter.  Before the end of the day there are fifty versions of basically the same “you’ve got to try this” new edtech thing.

I think that’s the main problem.  Too many people are dipping their toes into so many new technologies that no one is taking the time to really understand how most of them can change what we are already doing.  I’m going to do like John has done.  I’m going to take control of my own professional development and plunge into something for a while.  Maybe some of the technologies I’ve sampled can make a real difference for me.  I feel another series coming on.

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Turnitin’s method is fair use

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

Last year a group of students decided to fight back against the plagiarism tool being used by their school.  Before submitting an assignment to Turnitin, one of the students submitted all the legal documents to register the original paper as a copyrighted work.

Turnitin is a service that scrutinizes papers to determine if any part of the work has been plagiarized.  Turnitin does this by comparing all submitted papers with what is on the Internet in addition to all other documents submitted (about 100,000 per day) by subscribers to the service.

The argument by the students was that Turnitin was infringing on the copyright holder’s exclusive rights and also making money in the process.  To prove the point, the students jumped through all the hoops required to register a paper with the US copyright office and then filed a suite against Turnitin for copyright infringement.

It didn’t work.  Judge Claude M. Hilton has thrown the case out in a US District Court in Virginia.

Hilton found that iParadigm’s use of the students’ essays was transformative and valuable. In contrast, student essays in their normal form were viewed as having no market, and their reuse by turnitin did not in any way diminish the students’ “incentive for creativity”—namely, their grades.

Until a teenager writes a best seller, the market for high school creative writing assignments isn’t likely to expand.

Posted in copyright | Tagged | 2 Comments

What’s wrong with this picture

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

Here is something most teenagers don’t know.  Stealing a CD from Wal-Mart isn’t nearly as bad (based on the magnitude of the fine) as downloading the same CD using an illegal P2P networking.  See chart below.

stealvsp2p.gif

If the height of the “steal” bar is twelve inches, the “download” bar is as tall as the Empire State building.  The exact difference will depend on where you live.  The “steal” bar could be 1/4 as tall (three inches) in your state.

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SP1 Fixed My Vista Problem

Posted on March 19, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

I have discussed the one major problem that I have had with Microsoft Vista.  For no apparent reason, my ability to right-click randomly stops working.  The problem continues until I close Internet Explorer.  Often closing it doesn’t work and I have to end the IE process from the Task Manager.

In the last week this problem has seemed to happen more each day.  On Monday I had to kill IE more than ten times.  I can live with once or twice a day, but not multiple times each hour.

I was anxious to download SP1 when it became available yesterday.  It took an hour to install, but I think it fixed my right-click problem.  So far (knock on wood) I haven’t had to restart IE one time.

I don’t know if IE was actually upgraded as part of the service pack.  I didn’t look before the upgrade, but now I have version 7.0.6001.1888CO.  I will check my other machine running Vista sans-SP1 to see if the version is different.

Suddenly I don’t like XP as much.

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