At MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog, Jason Mittell and Joel Greenberg have an interesting conversation going about copyright and Fair Use. With regard to media industries’ resistance to allow educators to teach about Fair Use, Mittell asks: “Why would the industry want to restrict educational practices that primarily teach students how to consume and create the very products that they wish to sell?” He offers some speculation and invites others to respond, and Greenberg offers an answer from an ad firm employee’s perspective:

To be honest, there is surprisingly little discussion of copyright outside the realm of “Who owns it; how much do they want for it?” [...]

They tend to make the acceptable use an exception of “All Rights Reserved,” which outlines specifically what other people can do with their content, as opposed to “Some Rights Reserved”, which typically does not.

Why? I think primarily for three reasons: 1) defaulting to stringent copyright interpretation is easy, indeed; there’s no questioning of your own assumptions involved; 2) doing so lessens your time with the lawyers, and 3) revolutionaries are not rewarded, so there’s little incentive to do something different.

Similarly, I see some educators taking a cue from media industries on this one, particularly when teaching classes in which the students hope to go on to be practitioners themselves. A design instructor I know at the University of Massachusetts, for example, requires that students use no one else’s copyrighted work in their projects. He feels that students are more likely to use such “sampling” as a shortcut early on in their education, which doesn’t adequately prepare them for what they’d have to do in an actual design job. Even in my own Visual Communication class last summer, I devoted some time to discussing stock photography, but the discussion of Fair Use was more of an impromptu comment on how I had technically broken the law in order to get the film clips I was showing them from DVDs. (Thanks to my friends and colleagues at Penn for helping make that no longer an issue!)