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EFF's Teaching Copyright curriculum was created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way. Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: * Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. * See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. * Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. * Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior.

Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing Web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free/open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia, and offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons-and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.

This course surveys the political and economic history of the commons, its strengths and limitations over the centuries, and its burgeoning contemporary manifestations.  We will be guided by the writings of Elinor Ostrom, Peter Linebaugh, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Peter Barnes, Lewis Hyde and David Bollier as well as by a range of films, essays and Web resources.  The course will have direct conversations with policy experts, academics and activists who are at the forefront of commons work, and confront the ambiguities and perplexities of this still-emerging realm of thought and action.

"As the world economy increasingly centers on "memes, genes, and bits," new technologies permit new production models that threaten entrenched interests. As a consequence, we face a looming political battle that could reshape the information society. There are three main barriers to democratic participation in setting the rules of the information economy that bias the playing field in favor of entrenched interests and old models. The first is that the harms of bad A2K policy often take a long time to manifest themselves, making it difficult to instill a sense of urgency in the body politic and among policy elites. The current experience of "information overload" obscures increasing regulation of the use of knowledge. The second is that information policy issues tend to be highly technical and esoteric to the uninitiated, and difficult even for the initiated to analyze effectively. The third is that the promises of a world where knowledge is free as the air we breathe seems ephemeral in the face of the concrete harms claimed by those who would fence off the information commons."