mannybolone said:Rockadelic said:ODub......how about we film you teaching your class for a year, then package it on video and provide it to schools across the country to teach their students without you getting any compensation?
You signing up for that??
It's quite common for lecture note companies to have students copy down your lectures then resell them in future courses. This is also in a legal grey area - each school has different rules on this - but I can tell you this much: if I tried to sell my own lecture notes to my own students, I'd be inviting a serious shit storm on my head from school administrators. In that respect, I don't really "own" my intellectual labor, at least not in this situation.
Looking into the future (and I'm answering your question in a lot more detail than you probably wanted), this may change though, especially as more universities begin to turn to online teaching as a way to lower costs and raise revenue. But again, even in that situation, my content is not my own. Unless the model radically changes, I wouldn't be able to create an online course for my home campus and then turn around and sell it to another campus. If my campus administrators wanted to do that, they'd have to get my permission (and theoretically, dole out some compensation) but I'm not a free agent, able to market my intellectual wares to an open market.
Therefore, what exactly is my investment here in preventing people from distributing my lectures for free? I'm not really getting paid to "produce" a lecture as a unit-ized product (even though I do get paid to teach). Until we've arrived at such a model (which could happen, certainly), this is a moot point.
The better analog would be if someone bootlegged a book I wrote and distributed it for free. In principle, I might take issue with that, but in reality? Academic books have limited distribution/circulation, in 99.9% of the cases, there's no "profit" to be made regardless, and as a scholar, I'm more invested in having my work circulated than I am in seeing returns on a publication that I know won't make money regardless.
Furthermore, in my line of work, the more my ideas are distributed tends to be better for me (unless I'm writing missives about "Little Eichmanns" dying in the WTC). I'm not paid to produce ideas in a direct, marketable way. I'm paid to do research and teach, neither of which can be unit-ized or replicated by others in a similar fashion as a cultural product, such as music.
All of which is to say: you can't compare the music industry and academia.
Or the music industry and the produce industry for that matter either.
Your particular situation at your university is not a rule of law, it's a result of your specific contract. If I was the lawyer working for the university, I'd write the contract to basically say "whatever Odub does is owned by the school". If I were your lawyer, it would say "Odub is licensing his services, on a limited basis, to the school...." Copyright law protects the holder, so if your current contract didn't give the school the right to your work, the comparison to the music industry would be more apt. I just paid $150 to watch a continuing legal education lecture on expert witnesses to partially satisfy the state bar requirements. Tomorrow, I have to attend a live lecture (also offered via the web) that costs $350 in either format. There is absolutely a value to copy-written lectures.
Music on the web is different...the value is as an art that can be appreciated over and over again. Posting copy-written music on a blog is illegal, but if your not offering it for a download, I don't see the harm, in fact, I think it helps promote the artist's work.
fft. Your firm doesn't pay for that shit.
