copy this blog

My personal major interest is intellectual property. I was introduced to some of the issues related to copyright from before I can really remember. One of the big things that concerned me early on in my college career was related to anime, as one of the founders of the Anime Club at Syracuse University. Did the anime club have the right to show episodes that were commercially released in the US? Could the anime club legally have showings of materials that were fan subtitled and not commercially available? What was the legal status of fansubs? What was the legal status of fandubs? What about fan transcripts? For that matter, what about fan fiction published on the Internet? What about…? etc.

I still think about these subjects often. ^_^

Kayla, Lori, Patrick, Quinn, Sam, and I spoke at Educause about scaling the course we’ve all taught, INF 312 Information in Cyberspace. When developing my section, I wrote a bit about some of the privacy concerns we had. Then I had to include copyright. Then I had to at least mention accessibility. Finally we lumped them into “legal concerns.” It’s not the largest part of the section I talk about. But it’s the part that keeps on slightly expanding. There’s a lot to say there.

There are some serious legal concerns that appear when you move a class online, and some of these aren’t immediately obvious. I’ll write about them a bit more when I make sure that this blog is working correctly. ^_^