Peer to Peer University: Copyright for Educators

Written by Andrew Rens on August 26th, 2009

Some time ago I asked for suggestions for an on-line course on the practicalities of the Knowledge Commons. Due in part to the feedback that has become a course on Copyright for Educators.

Copyright for Educators is a six week course on ….(you guessed it) ‘copyright’ and its aimed (surprise surprise) at educators. Its a scenario driven course intended to help educators think through scenarios in which they we need to navigate copyright in order to use learning materials.

The course is offered as one of the pioneering courses at the Peer to Peer University which is “an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses”. The first iteration of Copyright for Educators is being facilitated by a team of US, Australian and South African lawyers.

Today is the last day to sign up for this iteration of the course.

 

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The South African Open Copyright Review Final Report is online

Written by Andrew Rens on August 7th, 2009

The final Report of the South African Open Copyright Review is online.

The Review closed last year, but its taken us a bit of time to produced a properly formatted downloadable version of the final Report. Now we have and its available for download, under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike South Africa 2.5 licence.

The Report includes recommendations on exceptions and limitations, Orphan Works, strengthening the Public Domain, and parallel import.

The Report comes at an interesting point in the debate about copyright. Although librarians and educators have argued for appropriate exceptions and limitations, ever since the current Copyright Act was passed in 1978 (and possibly before then), the issues of Orphan Works and the Public Domain have been largely neglected, and the prohibition on parallel imports has received far too little attention.

Basic reforms on these issues are overdue.

 

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