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Creative Commons is facilitating the use and reuse of educational materials. According to this post written by a policy coordinator at the nonprofit organization, it can potentially allow students to save money they would be spending on textbooks. A professor at the University of MIchigan published a $10 book in 11 days because he adapted a book "offered under an open content license"

The use of Creative Commons licenses to broaden access to educational materials represents a general shift in academia. Although universities have often controlled this access to knowledge, these open source resources allow most people to educate themselves without the high barriers to entry, such as tuition. Like the MIT Open CourseWare, "iTunes U" compiles lectures from various universities. NYU actually just sent out its IT newsletter e-mail today, which contained a notice about its Open Education Pilot program. http://www.nyu.edu/its/connect/w11/openedpilot.html Even though it seems like universities are open to sharing lecture materials and other educational resources under the Creative Commons license, how lenient do you think these schools will be? Would they truly offer alternative textbooks in which the college has to forfeit their profit from their bookstore, for example?

I think this plan to pass the Digital Economy Act is completely unfair. It is certainly important to protect copyrighted works, but it is necessary to do so at the risk of eliminating equal access to information?

Sahi, a commuter science major at Princeton, Class of 2010, was able to collect more concrete data regarding shared torrents or large files across the sharing site. Looking at the identification numbers of anonymous users, this February, Sahi found that perhaps only ten out of a 1000 files were actually legal. Although it is a known fact that BitTorrent contains pirated material, this project will help identify which files are being accessed most frequently, which may ultimately aid in efforts to prevent piracy.

Films by Hitchcock, books by Virginia Woolf and Picasso's Guernica--just to name a few--are some of the works that are no longer readily accessible to the public. In a new case, Golan v. Holder, orchestra conductors, teachers and film archivists, are fighting for the right to perform, adapt and distribute creative works that they relied on for years without having to consider copyrights and their respective fees. Should these famous works be returned to the public domain?