Class materials and copyright.

Some interesting points raised here and here on the legality of making course materials copied from university library stocks to students taking courses.

Making course materials available online (in a password protected area) for a course clearly saves everybody time and effort - as well as arguably increasing the amount of students that will actually access the material. However, its understandable that publishers are concerned that they may be loosing revenues in the long run - how many copies should a library have to hold before this is legitimate? 1 per student? Also restricting the practice seems to fly in the face of exploiting the potential good 24hour online access can do (going to the library is worthwhile - qeueing for half an hour to photocopy course materials probably isn't).

Unfortunately the answer is that coying materials in this way en-masse probably isn't legal. However beyond this interestign questions are:

• If the current licensing model publishers are using won't allow this type of
  use (even though its clearly desirable) - what licensing models will? shouldn't
  the existing ones be changed?
  
  
• Isn't this likely to create pressure which favours course materials published under
  open licenses such as those provided by
  creative commons. if i have competing
  materials under standard licenses and under a CC license and i want to give
  students electronic access the choice is a no-brainer. [sidenote: the amount
  of stuff out there is growing]
  
  
• Where is the balance between these two?
  

Seems like an interesting possible consequence of cracking down on use of materials in this way (if that indeed were to happen) might be to force educators to A) seek alternatives and B) consider publishing their own materials in less restrictive ways. A loose loose for publishers if a reasonably attractive alternative is not found.

Thanks peter for the tip!