September 11, 2006 |
O P I N I O N s
By CORY DOCTOROW
Special to the Daily Trojan
Universities — USC especially — are
at a crossroads: Do they exist to promote
scholarship, or do they exist to protect
the business models of entertainment
companies at any cost?
As students were returning to the
USC campus for the 2006-2007 year,
they were sent an ominous memo on
“Copyright Compliance,” signed by
Michael Pearce, USC deputy chief infor-
mation officer and Michael L. Jackson,
vice president for Student Affairs.
This extraordinary document set out
a bizarre, nonlegal view of copyright’s
intent and the university’s purpose, and
made it clear that in its authors’ views,
scholarship takes a backseat to copy-
right.
Copyright is a bargain. It grants
some exclusive rights to authors and
reserves the remaining rights to the pub-
lic. The Constitution’s framers were clear
on this issue, having lived through the
evils of monopolies endowed by the king
in pre-Revolutionary times. They knew
that granting monopolies to authors
and their publishers was a dangerous
business
because
the goods of knowl-
edge are the core of
scholarship, criticism,
innovation and free
speech.
That’s why inter-
national
copyright
treaties and U.S. copy-
right law contain vital
exceptions for educators, archivists, the
disabled, scholars, parodists and artists.
These exceptions have their origins in
the tradition of the academy, the uni-
versity’s fundamental practice of taking
others’ work, analyzing it, criticizing it
and building upon it.
The USC “Copyright Compliance”
letter doesn’t breathe a word of this.
Instead, it contains passages like this:
“Copyright
infringement occurs
whenever someone makes a copy of
any copyrighted work — songs, videos,
software, cartoons, photographs, stories,
novels — without purchasing that copy
from the copyright owner or obtaining
permission some other way.”
This is simply untrue — if it’s true,
we should lock the library doors and
arrest any professor who turns up wi