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Putting teaching materials on the web doesn't necessarily promote public knowledge. Sometimes, it undermines it-along with academic freedom.
When faculty members consider copyright in the digital age, it is often in relation to things we can't (or shouldn't) do. For example, we can't have too much material placed in online reserve, we can't scan journal articles to create digital versions of what used to be called "course packs," and we can't post an excerpt from a work of scholarship on our blogs without appropriate permissions.
Yet copyright also empowers faculty authors, and that flip side of copyright, especially as it relates to challenges posed by the posting of our teaching materials on the public web, is our subject here. The web offers great advantages for the dissemination of scholarly information, but that same technology, in its uniqueness, can also endanger our ability to ensure that our teaching materials and the products of our research are not exploited for ends we might not have imagined.
A number of examples will illustrate how the web can complicate intellectual work. First, consider this case: a department staffmember recently asked one of us for an electronic copy of an old syllabus without explanation. Having deposited paper copies of syllabi in the department office for years, we were surprised by the request. It turned out that copies of all syllabi were now going beyond the file cabinet; they were being scanned and posted to the department's public website to allow former students easy access to them. (However, the department chair, anticipating potential problems with posting faculty syllabi online, ended the practice and no syllabi were posted.)
One might wonder, "What's the big deal about posting a syllabus to a website?" Placing paper copies in a file cabinet is very different from putting a syllabus on a public website: the latter engages an enormously complex set of sometimes conflicting rights and claims over faculty ownership of intellectual property, the need for various interested parties to access materials created by faculty, and public demands for general access to materials produced at a public university.
A Problem of Milliseconds
Some faculty members assume that recent upheavals in copyright law result from a "new" ease in copying texts posted on the web....