I'm not surprised. Cornell University along with the American Association of Publishers has developed a set of copyright guideline which states that the same fair use principles apply for electronic copies of documents placed in course management systems as do for print copies. In other words, it's not fair use to merely put electronic copies of texts in a password protected website. The copyright clearance center has a brochure outlining this new policy.

As I said, I'm not surprised. I predicted this in my dissertation, "The Future Is Open" for Composition Studies: A New Intellectual Property Model in the Digital Age. I've included the relevant text below for those that are interested:

In defining five basic changes to copyright law that the TEACH Act permits, Laura Gasaway suggests that

it removes the concept of the physical classroom and recognizes that a student should be able to access the digital content of the course wherever he or she has access to a computer. (82).

Placeholder for publishing a version of my dissertation manuscript.

The story about Sony's new copyright right protection software keeps getting more and more twisted. In response to the many security problems, apparently Sony will be recalling some 4.7 million CD's. It now sounds like Sony has engaged in massive IP piracy. Members of the open source community have determined that part of the application makes use of LAME, an open source MP3 encoder. LAME is made available under the copyleft LGPL, "which requires that any program that tightly integrates its code into its executable must acknowledge this use and release the full source code to their program" (Ars Technica). According to Wired News, Sony and "First4Internet, which sold the XCP software program used by Sony BMG on its CDs, declined to comment after repeated requests since Monday." I seriously hope the FSF sues Sony for copyright infringement.

Open Access News notes that theology scholar Jacob Neusner, author/editor of 900 books, wants to opt out of having his works included in Google Library. While Google will willingly remove a work if the copyright holder submits a form for each work, Neusner and his publisher, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, don't want to submit a form for each work and are demanding that Google remove them all anyway. Rowman and Littlefield wrote,

We think it's unfair and arrogant and disrespectful of publishers' and authors' rights, and we don't want to do business with an organization that thumbs its nose at publishers and authors.

Well, gotta love the irony. The CTEA, DMCA, aggressive copyright protection, expensive licensing of IP, and blatant disregard for others' fair use rights, courtesy of the content industries, is unfair, arrogant, and disrepectful to society and those who create IP (not those that merely acquire the rights and sell it).

I just discovered that Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (2005) is available for download on his website under a Creative Commons license. Great book for those interested in the copyfight debate. And here's a text-to-speech audio version.

I've been a little discouraged by some of the evaluations of MGM vs Grokster from the copyfighter side of the fence. For instance, problematic worst case scenarios:

• Vaidhyanathan claims that Google is now at risk for caching web pages and offering search services due to this ruling. I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps I'm wrong in my reading of the rulings, but it's not clear to me how Google is inducing copyright infringement with its basic search services. Granted, as Vaidhyanathan has pointed out, Google Print is at risk in a post-Grokster world. However, I would argue that Google Print was at equally at risk in a post-MP3.com world without a Grokster ruling.
• Porter and Rife fear that universities may be at risk, even though the main opinion delivered by Souter clearly supports P2P use in universities by describing P2P's beneficial use in that specific context: "Given these benefits in security, cost, and efficiency, peer-to-peer networks are employed to store and distribute electronic files by universities, government agencies, corporations, and libraries, among others" (2). Even without that statement, it seems a far reach to imagine that any lawsuit against a university based on inducement theory would be seen as anything other than frivolous.