Assignment Background and Notes
Intellectual Property: Copyright and Fair Use
(Computers and Composition; updated 4/99)

MOO session transcripts: April 29th
MOO session transcripts: May 4th

• Contact an online newspaper, journal, or book publisher and find out its policies and procedures for using their copyrighted materials in various formats: distance education courses, commercial multimedia production, and educational compact disks. Can you use images from their site in your hypertext essay? Include relevant context from legislation and/or legal precedent. Hypertext format with graphics.

 

• Interview a professor or professional in your field of study and develop a fair-use scenario that he or she may have faced or is currently facing. 

Some common scenarios: copying and distributing journal articles for class use; converting images for a class web site; digitizing photos for a slide collection; scanning texts for a concordance program; creating student web pages that may incorporate trademarked or copyrighted materials; converting sound recordings from an international source to a new format (German 78 rpm to a cassette or .wav file, for example); duplicating a film from Blockbuster for classroom use. 

Write a report that addresses copyright issues, using relevant legal precedents or legislation, and offer a strategy based on fair-use principles. Chris Johnson, Director of Humanities Computing and Technology may be a good resource here, as he regularly receives duplicating, copying, scanning, and digitizing requests from faculty. His e-mail is cgj@u.arizona.edu. Another resource for authentic copyright problems is the Tucson Area Council on Technology's listserv. See me for details. Hypertext format with graphics.

• Form groups of two or three students each and take opposing sides in an intellectual property problem. You might have someone represent a digital artist who displays her work on the web and other parties who claim fair use under varying circumstances; invent the circumstances. Or you might have an online journal editor argue that students in a Scientific and Technical writing course cannot use the journal's trademarked logos in their print or online analytic reports. Be creative. Presentations and arguments should have a multimedia emphasis.

• Consider the Arizona Board of Regents Intellectual Property Policy as it currently regards the copyright ownership of student work (Approved: August 31, 1993 ):

C. OWNERSHIP OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 
1. University Owned Intellectual Property
5. Student Owned Intellectual Property; Students own the intellectual property they develop as a result of class work unless University resources beyond those described in Section C(2)(a) above are used in such development. Students own the copyrights for their theses and dissertations but ownership of other intellectual property described in these publications, including software and patentable inventions, will be determined according to Sections C(1) through (4) above. 

Compare the newer (draft) version:

C. Intellectual Property Creation and Ownership
4. Employee-Initiated Works [?]
e. student works (The student owns his/her own works, unless the student is a university employee and the work is part of his/her employment, or the student makes significant use of university resources, or the student's work is part of a Sponsor-supported project ...)

Interview a professor in your field of study, and interrogate potential scenarios that may affect the ownership of your work.  Do textual and rhetorical analyses of the two versions of the Intellectual Property Policy. Write a Background Report for students in your field, or a Memorandum to the Regents, expressing a position on the Policy.

Regents Intellectual Property Policy Draft: http://vpr2.admin.arizona.edu/ott/ABORdraft.htm

 
Regents  Current Intellectual Property Policy:
http://vpr2.admin.arizona.edu/ott/IPOLDGP.HTM