The need for a new kind of copyright

Posted on | November 19, 2009 | No Comments

I have embraced with “open arms” Creative Commons’ effort to provide open and customizable copyrights. It has become quite clear that the “one size  fits all” copyright of old no longer works for everyone. There’s another kind of “copy right” that I think is missing in modern law and that is the idea of an academic copyright.

With the advent of commercial ventures which use student work in ways that students may not have outrightly consented to, the time has come for a change. Previously the argument has been that these internet services are an extension of the implied right to evaluate and share which a student grants to a professor or evaluator when writing a paper. I ask, why doesn’t a student have the right to grant that ability to share and evaluate, but outrightly forbid the use of their intellectual property by any group aiming to make money off of it? Certain Creative Common licenses permit the free sharing of work except in the cases of commercial ventures, so why can’t students do the same thing with their work?

Shouldn’t content owners have a say in how their work is used commercially by other companies?

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