Blogs

In April of 2001 I began working in the position from which I now write, Director of Information Technology Policy at Cornell. As a law student, I had elected to take a course in intellectual property. Most of my classmates had engineering degrees and were headed for patent law as a career. I was another "Eng." major, English Literature, and wanted to know why publishers of the J.D. Salinger biography had pulled it before it hit the shelves. Turns out, the author had included full texts of letters Salinger had written a long-term lover. The author had access to the letters, but she did not have the copyright in them. A fair use defense would not have sufficed under the circumstances. Consequently, the publishers removed the letters before publication.

When there’s not a lot of good news around, it was uplifting to check Twitter late last night after a full day and find out that a federal judge has upheld fair use in an important case. Judge Harold Baer denied the Authors Guild et al’s motion for summary judgment (making quite a hash of their arguments in the process) but affirmed that what the Hathi Trust is doing is legal.

What platform do you use for synchronous online learning? Adobe Connect? Blackboard Collaborate? WebEx? GoToMeeting? BigBlueButton? Skype? Google Hangouts? A new startup, Zoom.us, is determined to shakeup this market.

With much of selective higher ed focused on the Supreme Court and its impending declaration on affirmative action in admissions, I’m grateful again to be at a community college. Here, affirmative action in admissions is a non-issue; we take all comers. We have our own legal and political challenges, heaven knows, but not that one.

The calculus behind Economics teaches that consumers make choices so as to equalize the marginal utility per dollar spent on each of the last of different types of items purchased. Although I believe this, I was reminded recently of what I think is often an alternative decision rule I heard years ago that might better describe the way cash constrained students make decisions when seeking places for dining out.

We need to rethink the fair use doctrine by adding transformative works as they have been defined in United States case law to the existing four factors that are already codified, and expand its overall usage, especially in the area of not-for-profit educational endeavors.

Connecticut’s new centralized higher education system office has apparently been making either offers or threats -- there’s some dispute, and I have no inside information on it -- to community college presidents. As I understand it, the legislature passed a law last year limiting remedial coursework to a single semester. Apparently, some campuses have balked, so the system office has let the presidents know that if they feel unable to comply, they are welcome to leave.

When I graduated in March last year, I expected to enjoy the pomp of the ceremony, the sumptuous and faintly ridiculous robes and hat of formal academic dress, and the joy of receiving my doctoral degree with my parents in the audience. And I did enjoy all of this, but what surprised me was my pleasure at being able to call myself Dr Duff. I have a title which is absolutely gender neutral, and it reflects the decade’s worth of hard work which went into my university education. But I never expected to insist that others use my title, and I still feel slightly odd calling myself Dr Duff.