Tuition protest at the U of Toronto (cc licensed)

After writing a review of Anya Kamenetz’s book on education reform, DIY U yesterday, in which I mentioned that I thought it was a larger issue than cost control, I woke up this morning to a BBC article specifically about reducing costs in higher ed. I don’t disagree when people say this is a huge issue, and I am sympathetic to arguments that the education “bubble” is on track to bursting [see also], much as the housing market did. Here are a couple follow up thoughts on cost control:

In the United States, education budgets largely fall under the states’ control, with federal assistance in loans and grants funneled to the students. State budgets are seriously crunched by falling tax revenue, and they have no way to print more in particularly needy times. (Here in Oregon, state lawmakers are struggling with a $577 million shortfall due to below-expected revenue). Around the world, governments are hard-pressed to come up with the funds to provide for their educational institutions just as banks are becoming less willing to loan to students, seeing them as riskier bets than in the last decade.

The cost of higher education, then, is a front burner issue. But I hoped schools would not focus solely on their budgets. That is because I believe the technological developments that Kamenetz celebrates in DIY U actually do provide the opportunity for learning that is far cheaper than the mechanisms currently employed for that purpose. What worries me about this possibility is that by focusing on the chances for cost-reduction, the chances the same technology allows for radically improving education may be ignored. And there are those who think moving to Internet courses for cost-reduction would hurt educational quality (see the ginandtacos quote from my previous review and my comment to it directly). It takes a conscious shift in pedagogy to use a student’s time in school for network- and knowledge-building.

I think the connectivist model of learning that Kamenetz mentions on pg 110 (From Stephen Downes and George Siemens) is a powerful model that is useful to students inside or outside of institutions. As a theory of learning, it applies whether or not a classroom is intentionally set up to recognize it. But an educational structure that focuses on helping students build a personal learning network and build knowledge together is especially powerful. You won’t get to this point if you’re just focusing on cutting costs, but it just so happens that a lot of free online tools, from microblogging (twitter) to wikis are especially suited to collaborative network-aware learning. These enable students to network with one another within a course and form connections with professionals outside the university. Add in the expertise of a well-read professor to curate content, and you can get a lot of learning done. Then you can follow Anya’s and others’ advice on cost reduction by streamlining, unbundling course content, liberally licensing and reusing content from many professors.

If there is a burst bubble in education, networked learning will still occur. There will be a lot of scrambling to find workable models outside institutions if they go bankrupt or price their product out of students’ hands. I think Stephen Downes, George Siemens and others in the open education movement are on a good track in this pursuit, and I will encourage students who want DIY learning to look into their model. Despite my worry for higher ed institutions, I believe in the model of a course, where important discussions in a field are curated up for a group of students to connect with and explore (as opposed to students browsing through search results and Wikipedia on their own). Someone will bring this model to tomorrow’s students without plunging them into unmanageable debt. It might be universities after all (see this hopeful example). I just worry that if they focus only on cutting costs (from their overall budget and those passed on to students), they will end up treading water in terms of educational quality instead of using the available tools to move ahead.

DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

Anya Kamenetz’s book on education reform, DIY U, was a worthwhile read. In the first half of the book, she discusses the problems confronting America’s higher ed infrastructure. Her perspective here is useful, bringing in information about spiraling student debt loads and increasing tuition. As a 2008 college graduate, I experienced many of these problems firsthand. I waded through this section as fast as I could, eager to dig into Kamenetz’s suggestions for do-it-yourself education. The second half of DIY U is dedicated to outlining possibilities for reforms that could solve these problems.

Unfortunately, while there is a useful guide that distills and frames some of the huge constellation of available educational resources now available on the Internet in chapter 7, the rest of part 2 was underdeveloped where I had hoped it would shine. Still, I should mention that I thought a few of the high school seniors I know would get a lot out of reading it. From my experience talking to the graduating members of the class of 2010, belief in the 4-year college as the ticket to a successful life remains strong, even among those who don’t really know what they want to do with their lives. When I was that age in 2003, I too gave no thought to other options. I’m glad I did complete my undergrad and took on the debt that enabled me to complete my degree because I think I learned a lot while studying there. By the time I got out, I didn’t expect my degree to do for me what I had thought it would do going in though. And I think it’s good I came to that realization.

In their joint review of DIY U for the open access journal in education, Jon Becker, Meredith Stewart and Jason Green mention that Kamenetz should have separated her analysis of institutional reform efforts from student-led DIY reform. I felt the same way about that. A university moving some classes to the Internet to save money is a separate issue from students trying to achieve the best education they can afford. (The fact that universities typically do not hand the cost reductions from online classes down to students makes this point especially clear.) Other reviews discussed in the #DIYU hashtag on Twitter mention the same shortcoming. For example, Zunguzungu’s post emphasizes that universities have steadily shifted costs to students, rather than the notion that students are paying more simply because costs have gone up. Ed from ginandtacos emphasized the parties getting “ground up” in the rush to bring education online in his fiery review of the book, (It’s mainly the students and adjuncts who are forced to teach the online options).

Philip Auerswald recently mentioned DIY U and summarized part of the universities’ dilemma like this:

The costs of a college education have risen more rapidly in the past quarter century than even the much-discussed cost of health care, yet over the same interval the quality of the service provided has–let’s be honest here–not improved.

And the ginandtacos review brought online courses specifically into the firing line, saying:

No one who has taken or taught one can claim in earnest to have learned more than they do in traditional courses. Few could honestly claim that they learned anything at all. … The adjuncting wave of the early 1990s was supposed to make education cheaper. It didn’t. Now online courses are supposed to be making education cheaper (price being conflated with accessibility in this line of argument).

It’s not enough to bring its cost back in line with what a student can reasonably afford. That is not the vision of education reform I hoped for in DIY U. As I mentioned in my preliminary comments on chapter 3, reform that reduces costs while keeping the quality of learning roughly stable is not a solution to the problems I sensed in my own undergrad study. Replacing the learning done in a traditional classroom is not what the Internet is for, I think. There are new tools for collaboration, for shared knowledge creation, for the persistence of learning networks beyond a 10 or 16 week term. I think the possibilities that connected education creates go a lot further than reducing transmission costs or increasing access. I wished to see a picture of how the best elements of the university (which I saw as the great potential energy created by a classroom full of minds engaged on a particular topic) could be strengthened and set free by collaborative tools now available online.

But as Anya said here (and also here), she wrote the book to start–or widen–a conversation rather than to finish one. The people who will actually create the next generation of learning are the students who put their future on the line to try things that haven’t been done before, and perhaps also some institutions adventurous enough to give professors that chance within their walls.

The university felt inefficient to me because it didn’t quite get me and my classmates to the level of “deep” learning that I wanted. My classes were more surveys than deep analysis. We rarely got past figuring out what authors were saying about a particular topic, as we usually had more readings assigned than a couple days of class discussions  a week could cover and usually more than a students could manage to carefully digest on their own. The other elements of the inefficiency I felt are in the artifacts and networks my classmates and I created. We each wrote dozens of papers over the years, but I don’t now have access to any of the insights other students’ gained that they didn’t mention in discussion. As I mentioned in my chapter 3 comments, the box of notebooks I have in the garage is a pretty poor artifact of learning itself. Its contents need weeks of effort to turn into something that I could share with somebody else. I want an educational network that builds knowledge together, not focused into our own notebooks and papers that only our professor will ever read. And I regret not taking the efforts necessary to ensure my learning networks would continue after the end of a particular class. To me, successful transformation of this experience means better learning for individuals and better collaboration for groups to get even undergrads to the deep analysis that the valuable curation of perspectives makes possible.

Professors spend a lot of their effort designing courses to curate up interesting analysis and comparison of high quality scholarship, but the execution is weakened by this inefficiency. Students can’t get as deep into comparing these perspectives as their professors wish they could. Class networks are limited in space and time by the present pedagogy, but they do not need to be. Outside institutions, learning networks grow and decay organically as individuals’ interest in a topic develops. Jason Green made this point in a comment to my chapter 3 review, talking about the conversation that sprung up around #DIYU:

This ad hoc learning network addresses some of the complaints you have about the university. The network that forms around this project can persist. The blog posts people write will persist. The lack of an “instructor” shaping the discussion and lecturing forces participants to interact and be active if they want to learn.

Successful reform within institutions would bring in this dynamic that is born of successful DIY learning.

While many of the discussions already stewing in the open education community are not answered in this book, hopefully DIY U is read widely outside of that (pretty tight) network and helps bring these issues and possibilities into new heads. Anya Kamenetz leaves a lot of room for others to imagine what learning in the future will actually look like. She introduces a few of the problems that students of DIY methods (or “open education”) will encounter, but leaves the solutions to them.

Among the largest challenges discussed in the open education community is the question of accreditation: how will students of openly available online courses demonstrate the same level of knowledge in a subject as those who possess a transcript from a well-known university? The lack of a widely accepted method of documenting DIY learning and its outcomes will leave students at a disadvantage to those whose fancy college diploma impresses employers. While some employers like Google do their own testing to determine candidates’ quality, there is a lot of inertia in the current education value model. Employers often want to leave the evaluation of a student’s performance in school to the schools. Until it becomes common for employers to see candidates providing cobbled together documentation of learning, people will have to overcome a massive hurdle. Karl Grindal notes a consequence of students starting to adopt a DIY approach:

While certainly insufficient, if not wholly inappropriate, its a simple fact that employers prefer the student who went to an “impressive school” over one who goes to a community college. By creating an online alternative to on campus education, we risk increasing the distance between the haves and the have nots.

Another great hurdle that Kamenetz seems to gloss over is actually building a “personal learning network.” It takes a lot of engagement, time, hard work, and luck to get it going. Stian Håklev, one of the founders of the peer2peer University (p2pu), mentions in a recent presentation overviewing open education that the early stages of network building can be lonely and can take years of blogging into thin air. Higher ed institutions have a huge head start in creating learning networks because they by definition bring people together. In my experience, those networks often failed to persist as well as those developed outside the university, but if an institution built its pedagogy around helping students connect with each other and experts, I think we could see a revolutionary jump forward in the effectiveness of higher ed.

I’m glad to have read Anya Kamenetz’s contribution to this conversation, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in connected education reform. I look forward to the next stages in this conversation, and I would even encourage @anya1anya to revisit this material and work in a deeper analysis of the questions she left open this time.

This sort of resource compounds its value when it proliferates. Youtube has a huge number of songs and music videos uploaded, including live performance videos. Services like Spotify (not available in the US), and the subscription option Rhapsody give users a wide vareity of licensed tracks to build playlists from. Blip.fm builds another layer on top of these streaming resources, by making social sharing of tracks effortless and fun without hosting most files itself. You can follow “DJs” on Blip.fm who play things you like; they build their own reputation and introduce their subscribers to new music at the same time.

So, first point: this is good for music listeners.

Despite not paying for the Thieves tracks you might listen to tonight on MySpace, their availability might translate into ticket dollars (or maybe CD sales) for a portion of their audience. This consumption, when it happens, is increasingly driven by informed choice, and less by marketing. More people listening to an artist’s tracks means more exposure. More discussion about them (even little bits, like the comments on some Blip.fm posts) builds buzz the same way an organized marketing campaign does.

So, second point: this may be good for artists on the whole. Some of this activity produces revenue directly for artists (like the subscription service Rhapsody.) Some of it produces revenue indirectly. Some of it produces no revenue, and may even potentially subtract revenue if a user that would have bought a CD doesn’t when they find they can listen to some tracks online for free.Research has for a while been indicating that this is not true.

Some of the listening over these streaming sources is not authorized by the copyright holders. For example, some of the tracks queued up on Blip.fm from wherever they are around the web (frequently they are Youtube videos) were not authorized uploads. The objection of a copyright holder to one of these tracks has to take the form of a DMCA takedown notice to the service where it is hosted, not to blip.fm, which only hosts authorized tracks itself. So even when a few tracks are rooted out, the service stays almost completely whole. Legality is questionable, but the industry may be forced to ride the wave anyway.

There is value in finding music that appeals to a certain individual. These tools increasingly make it possible for individuals to navigate the increasingly vast world of available music to find the artists that appeal to them personally. Predictive algorithms, like on Pandora or Last.fm help guess new music that might be appealing, but the best way to find out new music is to find out what people you know are listening to. Word of mouth. There is a huge variety of music available, so filtering mechanisms have become more important. Discovery of music in general is easy, but it is hard to determine whether you have discovered the “best” that there is. Radio used to be the most important filtering mechanism, but radio has not done very well in the Web era. Formats have become more and more standardized when users want more individualized choices. As curators of content, radio stations haven’t developed individual personalities or featured their DJ staff for their own personal tastes. Instead, relatively homogenized playlists are the norm. There are exceptions among college radio stations and independents like WFMU, but for the most part, radio is losing out to individuals in the area of offering individualized music choices. In their stead, individuals using services like Spotify and Playlist.com are sharing their own modern mixtapes. And users are enjoying it.

So, will the other side of the music industry, the record companies that have been suing music fans, be driven to come on board with an “on demand” paradigm?

The last couple weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of Net Neutrality notes, and today’s libertarian reaction to the FCC neutrality push was interesting. Libertarian group BreakTheMatrix is acting as if this new government regulation of markets is going to destroy the innovative opportunities ISPs have had to do what they like with their networks, the opportunities that have made the Internet such a great place. It seems to be really knee-jerk and formulaic and disregards that ISPs have mostly kept their networks neutral so far. The neutrality is what the other side says has created such an innovative atmosphere, not the freedom of the ISPs to disregard it.

“It’s unfair competition with unjust enrichment,” Marburger says. It’s also a downward spiral toward extinction. “If the copyright law doesn’t open the way for originators of news to stop the free riding, newspapers will die,” he said.  “No exceptions.”

The Marburgers propose a change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available on only their Web sites for the first 24 hours.

Shultz’s column is posted at: http://www.cleveland.com/schultz/index.ssf/2009/06/tighter_copyright_law_could_sa.html (though it is worth noting that I read it first through an “aggregator” run by Daryl Cagle here.)

This plan is hogwash. I’m sorry I have to be so harsh, but here is yet another newspaper person who doesn’t understand why newspapers are failing, and doesn’t understand the consequences of what she proposes to “fix” them (by actually not fixing them at all and diminishing the people’s rights of free speech). Freedom of speech is the issue here, particularly that increasingly important facet of freedom called “fair use”. The public’s fair use right is a “defense” against an accusation of copyright infringement, that covers limited uses of copyrighted material for legitimate purposes, such as academic use or “review” of content. (See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ). It involves a “balancing test” to determine whether or not unauthorized use is “fair.” As part of this balancing, an Internet “aggregator” (a type of site that I cannot meaningfully distinguish from a mere “blog”) is more likely to prevail with a fair use claim if they merely quote a snippet of an article like Google News does, than if they republish the entire article.

Now here’s what Ms. Schultz doesn’t understand: In print, when an author such as a newspaper writer uses somebody else’s words without authorization, we call it “quoting.” Quotes are attributed to sources, and are an essential part of almost every news story. They are usually the meatiest part of the story. Some quotes are sourced directly by a reporter, through investigation, but others are copied from other people’s interviews or press conferences. We would not dream of forcing reporters to only use quotes that they sourced themselves or otherwise paid to use. Newspapers have never been held to this standard. Costs would soar, and newspapers would die if they were. Ms. Schultz suggests that we force Internet reporters to pay for the quotes they find in order to report the news, when it just so happens that the person they are quoting is a newspaper reporter.

Now to her “solution”. The two points of “remedy” that are prescribed are a wishlist, not actual changes you can make to the law. In order to effect a change to copyright law that would force Internet reporters to turn over their revenue to the sources for their quotes, this would have to be codified against those reporters’ fair use rights, greatly diminishing those essential freedoms. I don’t see how that could be done fairly without applying the same standard to newspaper reporters as well. (Feel free to try to argue this distinction. I don’t see it.) The right to “quote” a reasonable amount of text from whoever you want for newsworthy “reveiw” purposes, I feel, is an essential part of our First Amendment rights.

If the First Amendment lawyer your newspaper hired (David Marburger) doesn’t understand this, you’ve been paying a lot of money to a fool, right? Isn’t that your newspaper’s problem, not the fact that an aggregator might scrape a few dollars of income? I’m sorry Craigslist is better than newspapers for posting what used to be called “classifieds”… while being free. Nobody is going to make much from those anymore; the world has changed. I’m sorry your paper can’t make enough money from local subcriptions, but isn’t that your fault too? If you can’t offer a product people will pay for, please don’t change the law to diminish my free speech rights in order to avoid the rest of the collapse of your failed business model.

(An aside:A big part of the problem is that almost all this country’s wealth is in the hands of just a few bigwigs.. making the bigwigs the only ones who are able to pay for anything is not a recipe for healthy institutions that rely on broad-based subscription models.  If you want to save your media, use it to correct this inequality. If you figure out how to do that, you will be indispensible. If we don’t have jobs, we can’t afford to subsidize yours. And we REFUSE to subsidize your job with our free speech rights.)

The business model that newspapers rely on exploits a monopoly over information to extract revenue from information’s scarcity. This works in a world where information is naturally scarce, but the Internet destroys that world. Information is plentiful now. Linking is possible, and doesn’t require going to the library to dig up a paper copy of somebody else’s newspaper anymore. People expect their overall news-reading experience to be better than newspapers are offering it now. The in-depth investigative stories are great and important, but the quick-glance-overview is necessary too, and newspapers can’t provide the up-to-the-minute

When Ms. Schultz said, “I heard (Plain Dealer Editor) Susan Goldberg talking about how revenue from online advertising is pathetically low and newspapers can’t recoup their investment. As soon as she said it, the wheels started turning…”, she didn’t realize when her editor said this that it works both ways; there isn’t really much money to be “stolen” by the aggregators anyway. (Here are 236 aggregated articles about this that I found with a 5-second search..  http://news.google.com/news/more?cf=all&ncl=dy4Xzvb2XWsTf6MWLGrE6qDOaRgBM If I wanted to read one, I could select from the snippets provided and read whatever reporter’s contribution looks best. Efficient competition in action. Beautiful, eh?) Butchering the people’s fair use right (an essential part of free speech utilized every day by newspaper reporters and news aggregators alike) in order to grab a mere single day’s worth of ad revenue is heinous. I love my fair use right more than newspapers, honestly. It makes conversation possible. Not to mention the massive bookkeeping expenses that would be incurred to anybody who wanted to run an aggregator. Can you imagine how complicated it would be to break down $10 in advertising among the 30 different stories and news sources that a medium-size blog might link to in a day? In the beginning of this paragraph, I fairly quoted Ms. Schultz, and I am going to post this on my blog without authorization or payment, asserting my essential fair use right to engage with the ideas that are floating around on the Web today. I’m also going to make diddly from advertising revenue. Nothing worth sharing back with you, even if I had ads posted on my blog (“aggregator” of news content I want my readers to see).

It is my absolute right to engage with Ms. Schultz’s article in agreement or disagreement. Newspaper people have trouble understanding that Internet reporters have the same rights to talk about (and “quote” and “link to”) any news story they want the exact same way that she has the right to do in her printed columns… except that you can’t click a link in a paper newspaper to see where this conversation came from like you would be able to on the Internet. The Internet does quoting and attribution better than newspapers do. These are important facets of journalism, and if newspapers can’t catch up to the Internet, they are going to be left behind, and should be.

Ms. Schultz thinks excerpting stories is unfair because most people won’t bother clicking through to read the whole story on most of the snippets they look at. Nobody owns the actual news that is reported. The actual events are uncopyrightable. The excerpts that aggregators or blogs may quote from news stories are taken under fair use. Ms. Shultz quotes her laywer saying that “these parasitic aggregators are capturing the heart of the stories so that readers have no need to visit the site of the original story,” but doesn’t realize that this is a good thing for news readers. When I look at news in the morning, I don’t want to spend hours on it, but I want to be broadly informed. A couple key sentences quoted by an intelligent aggregator (“blogger”) are all I want to read of 90% of the stories I see every day. I don’t want to waste my time reading a bunch of stuff I’m not interested in–I’d rather click through only to the 10% of stories that really capture my interest… And trust me, I do click through and read tons of stories. As I write this, I’ve got about a dozen stories open in background tabs in Firefox (that I clicked on from an aggregator) that I wanted to read today. I skimmed over hundreds of summaries and picked out exactly what I wanted. This is just like reading the front page of a newspaper with the first half-column of each story, and then flipping through to page C6 for the couple stories I wanted to read, EXCEPT that I can do this faster from an online aggregator, the news is more up-to-the-minute, and I can cover so much more ground it’s not even funny. Within minutes, I am connected to the best reporting from all around the country after just looking at a few aggregators. This is why the Internet is beating newspapers. The goal of Ms. Scultz’s plan is that “ideally, news originators’ stories would be available on only their Web sites for the first 24 hours” would kill the up-to-the-minute scannability of the “newsscape” via aggregators that the makes reading Internet news such a valuable experience. Nobody wants to read yesterday’s news today.

The future of newspapers looks more like an “aggregator” than a traditional newspaper, and if you are a newspaper that doesn’t get this, you are going to fail. Internet “aggregators” are better for the reader, cheaper to operate, can contain a wider breadth of news (by just excerpting and linking to the best of the work of others, wherever they have published it), and still let users link right to the exact full stories they want to read. If a publication saves money on getting a wide range of national/international stories, it can spend its resources paying people to write the great in-depth stories that are the best of what reporters can offer. These will be quoted and linked to by bloggers and aggregators. If you want your story about corruption to spread, let it be quoted and talked about. So do what newspapers do best; write the good stories. Then excerpt/link to the good stories that others have written. We’ll read the good stories when they percolate into view on our aggregators. We’ll use the excerpts we see to filter out the chaff.

Here the first link that I’ve been talking about: Murdoch says news aggregators like Google and Yahoo are illegally using his content, excerpting news stories to populate their news pages without negotiating a license. Some media companies realize that disallowing links mean they are seen by fewer eyeballs. Traditional media has long struggled to understand how the Internet works, and in this case News Corp and the AP are fighting against linking, which is how the Internet works to spread content. URLs (uniform resource locators) exist so that content can be spread. This is “the way things are,” and I think the excerpting and linking are firmly fair use, although courts have not made a clear distinction on the extent of this right.

Now another developing story: The AP has made a copyright claim that Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the iconic red, white, and blue Obama HOPE poster, developed the image through unauthorized use of a photo that the AP owns the license to. (The photographer who actually took the picture was thrilled to find out it was the source for the well-known poster, but the AP owns the licensing rights.) The AP claims the poster is an unauthorized transformative use of their proprietary content. I would argue that this is the way the world works. Content creators borrow substantive content that exists in the world and churn out new content.

The complication in the AP’s suit against Shepard Fairey is that, because transformative work like this is the way the world works, there are numerous examples of the AP doing essentially the same thing, selling licenses to photos that are substantially made up of intellectual content produced by others. And this is a good thing. The AP provides a valuable resource to newspapers and other media outlets by allowing them to access photos and news stories from around the world.

Shepard Fairey has responded to the AP’s copyright claim with a claim of his own, saying that the AP has no right to prevent others from enjoying meaningful fair use rights of proprietary content.

As I have stated before I am fighting the AP to protect the rights of all artists but I do want to emphasize one other important point. I’m not accusing the AP of infringing anybody’s rights. I’m saying everyone should have the same broad rights of fair use and free expression, and that includes The AP.

From Fairey’s lawyers’ response to the AP:

Defendant’s counterclaims are barred in whole or in part by the equitable doctrine of unclean hands. Specifically, The AP claims copyright ownership in, and makes commercial use of, many photographs that consist almost entirely of copyrighted artwork of Fairey and other artists without permission. Copies of these photographs are offered for sale and licensed for use by The AP through its image licensing database
available at http://www.apimages.com .

I am somewhat excited that these media players are trying to fight this battle already, because I think that the inevitable fair use decision that will come out of this will move the balance in the public’s favor. As is clear by the AP’s use of others’ intellectual content in their image licensing database, reusing content is the way the world works. Nobody who publishes content is clean in this matter. Reuse is so embedded in our conversations, in-person and otherwise, that it is often invisible to the conversants. I don’t mean that people can’t tell that you are quoting a line from Futurama, but that the fact that you are reusing existing content is so normal that it is not the important part. What we care about is that the joke we may have heard before has a funny application to whatever we were talking about right before you said that.

For the vast majority of reuses, no money is made, so they fly under the radar. In the stream of constant reuse of content, only a few examples make their way into the courts, and the courts declare that unauthorized reuse of works under copyright is wrong… Profits are garnished, and statutory damages are assessed, because a standard of fair use that protects everyday reuse of content has not been established. Of course not every use of copyrighted content could be justified as fair (some are more exploitive than creative), but the distinction hardly exists in the courts today. Fair use asks to be explored.

The Internet will change things. (It already has, but changes in society sometimes take a while to percolate into legal decisions.) The Futurama line you may have used on the street would be passed over, but if you republish Fox’s content online in one of the many formats that the Internet allows, your expression might be curtailed by a DMCA takedown notice. But a thousand other reuses of jokes originally seen on Fox TV will pop up the next day. The Internet makes it obvious that communication involves a lot of linking and reposting existing content, and that this communication is critical to democracy.

I have a feeling that the AP and Fox are making these copyright claims to protect the positions of the big players as the only arbiters of the news when this dynamic is already breaking down. The conversations among the little people are important now too. We appreciate the contributions of mainstream reporters and photographers around the world that write content for the big players, but current events are not solely theirs to discuss. Excerpting and linking to news stories are critical components of our democracy, just as transformative uses of existing content is a critical component of communication in general.

The little players know that linking makes them relevant. Blogs allow trackbacks intentionally. The hippest media try to make it possible to share their content, and license it so that others can legally reuse it.

I’ve joined an open education course offered by Mozilla that starts this morning. The above link doesn’t have anything there yet, but if you’re interested in open ed, subscribe to the course feed link below.
”’[http://ottonomy.net/drupal Nate Otto: "Free Schooler"/Writer]”’
* Email: nate AT ottonomy.net
* Based in: Eugene, OR
* Blog: http://ottonomy.net/blog (unrelated to this course)
* Course Portfolio: http://ottonomy.net/drupal/?q=node/12
* Course Feed Link: http://ottonomy.net/drupal/?q=taxonomy/term/1/0/feed
* Profile: …a graduate of the Univ. of Oregon. I wrote my honors college thesis on metaphors to replace “Intellectual Property” that encourage stewardship of the commons of ideas. [http://ottonomy.net/thesis The Free Culture Commons and Future Generations]
* Project: I would like to develop a short curriculum on open courseware resources for a small group of advanced high school students in a summer academy program. My goal is to teach students how to use OER and some individual strategies to enable classroom cooperation (and beyond) with web-based tools.I also want to develop a package of web tools that can be adapted to a range of middle/high school courses, which I can also use to host [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school "free school"] classes on my own server. I aim to help local teachers use OER strategies within their traditional classrooms.