The Education Blogs

“Fair Use” Photo by Lawgeek

I got a postcard in the mail the other day from WFMU announcing their upcoming record fair in NYC. Unfortunately, I won’t be making it up next weekend, but I did notice an announcement about some Negativland shorts under the title of “Our Favorite Things” and I was intrigued. So I Youtub’d “Negativland Favorite Things” and hit pay dirt. “Our Favorite Things” is a collection of “video shorts from our favorite copyleft heroes,” to quote WFMU’s description, “from U2 to Gimme the Mermaid here’s a solid hour of good, illegal fun.”

This newly minted law which calls for the creation of a ‘Copyright Czar,’ (”an unconstitutional violation of Separation of Powers”) is exactly what we have been waiting for, is it not? Just more charity on the part of the US Government to help big money through these troubling financial times. Moreover, it will ensure that the people are once again divested of their rights, and accountable to monied interests alone. God bless it!!!

TorrentFreak’s Ben Jones reports that UC Santa Cruz has decided to fight the RIAA’s  lawsuits aimed at their students by throwing a wrench in their methods:

photo credit: Invisible Hour

After uploading the final speech from First Blood to YouTube, I was immediately delivered a copyright notice from Google and Lionsgate. Here is what it looks like:

Click for larger version you can view in its entirety.

To quote:

Lionsgate has claimed some or all audio and visual content in your video First Blood (1982). This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program.

Source: bavatuesdays

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I’m a fan of TorrentFreak, it’s one of those rare blogs that streams interesting news on a very specific subject and openly acknowledges its biases while providing the reader with a ton of information to fend for themselves. In fact, I have come to think of TorrentFreak as one of the outposts in a war over our culture and piracy that goes generally unacknowledged in the educational sphere. We talk a lot about licensing and open resources in educational technology, but I think the 5000 pound elephant in the room that is the internecine battle over cultural distribution for the 21st century is being waged silently on the margins.