Is Copyright Still Respected?

Posted by Tad McIlwraith on April 28th, 2006 filed in Academia, Teaching

Rob Hyndman has another great post today, asking whether or not copyright is dead.  It’s part of a larger conversation about file sharing and the fact that many people will download music and other kinds of files despite the fact they know that it is illegal to do so.

It got me wondering if the problem I face with students not citing passages of published material — or even acknowledging that material derived from the web came from there — is part in parcel of a bigger belief that anything on the web is up for grabs.

Is it a stretch to think that people who download files illegally do not have any respect for the intellectual property of academic scholars either?  Hyndman’s suggests, afterall, we are seeing ‘a generation of people raised on disobedience to what they see as unjust [copyright and intellectual property] laws.”

And, how is copyright impacted by the push towards open access journals that many of us support?  Many of you know much more about these questions than I do.

 

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One Response to “Is Copyright Still Respected?”

  1. Tad McIlwraith Says:
    May 2nd, 2006 at 10:31 am

    In a mad fit of deleting spam, I also deleted Jamie’s comments. Here they are.

    I think that the thing that keeps me downloading is the fact that libraries (both university and public) are too underfunded and out of touch to keep up with the information that is available. If I could borrow the books, audio, and videos that I need from the library I would do it, but they just don’t have them. As a result, I have to download everything via bittorrent. A perfect example is my recent
    downloading of a bunch of Boas’s texts in PDF format from a torrent site because the library at my university either didn’t have them or had them on seemingly permanent loan to some grad student. The story is the same for anth videos which I often have to download because I can’t afford the $500 dollars to buy them to watch once.

    This reminds of something that is often overlooked in debates over downloading an copyright, namely, the temporary nature of the downloads. In the last few years I have probably downloaded over a terabyte of stuff, but right now I probably have less than a a gig of it on my computer. The stuff I do have will probably be gone by next week once I have watched it. For me downloading is like borrowing from a library. Once I am done watching something I delete it. If I need it again I redownload.

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