FairPlay: coming to a classroom near you?

Interesting discussion of DRM but most of the comments have a distorted perspective of academic freedom. However, my issue comes prior to the ivory tower discussions of DRM. Facilitating the learning of students is a priority. I am involved in an iTunesU roll out and have had our legal counsel review the agreement. He quickly pointed out that the agreement specifies that Apple controls the rights to all content posted on their iTunesU service. How do I justify using iTU if I have to give up the rights to the content?

Much as you'd like to think otherwise, what you pay for at a university is their certification of your transcript, and little else. Even if you got MIT's physics class for free (as one guy was talking about), that doesn't hurt MIT because without their imprimatur, you don't get their name on your diploma. It might help you and it can't hurt them. Please explain to me how this is a bad thing...

yo, very intriguing post here. i'd like to address a couple remarks made by Zack Williams and Jon Shipman, about auditing classes for 1/10-to-1/5 the cost [Zack], or sitting in on classes for free [Jon]. no malice meant or anything, but i wanted to offer that these comments contradict my own experience. i attended USC [undergrad] and NYU [M.A.]. at both schools, the audit price was exactly the same as the regular course price: no difference except for the fact that the auditing students didn't write the requisite papers or take the exams. also, at both schools, 'sitting in' on a class for an extended period was prohibited. obviously you could get away with sitting-in in a big lecture hall, and some cool professors would let non-enrolled students sit in for most-to-all of the semester in smaller classrooms, but by and large, this practice was generally discouraged and prohibited by policy.

i know USC and NYU are Big Expensive Private Schools [i was lucky to get scholarships Blah Fucking Blah]. does that render said schools: Giant Exceptions? i mean, i live in NYC, and here you also cannot sit-in [for an extended period] at, say, Hunter College or Borough of Manhattan Community College. after it's clear that you're not actually enrolled, you're just asked to leave. i always imagined the situation was the same at... oh... pick a random-but-not-as-famous school in the same basic price range as USC or NYU. University of the Pacific in Stockton CA for instance? i mean seriously, can you _actually go sit in at the majority of college classes_, or audit private U courses so cheaply? sorry if i look silly, but this idea is totally foreign to me.

Peter Suber raises a really good question; are these demands for DRM coming from the faculty or elsewhere? it's hard to tell if professors are just misinformed, thinking DRM is the only way to 'protect' their lectures etc; or if the demand for DRM is coming from other U staff [whom professors might want to challenge]?

i certainly agree that any DRM will be cracked. encodes are always always cracked. often by students.

but also, any potent ideas discussed in any lecture will be repeated outside the classroom. so, it's not as though this giant audience doesn't already exist. students would be shy about speaking up due to a podcast? well hm, in addition to the point made that iTunes U seems more properly suited to lectures [as opposed to classroom discussions that are more student-focused]... in addition to that, unless the simple presence of a recording device freaks you out, i don't see how recording a podcast is a huge change-up from the pre-iTunes university milieu. insightful/stupid/whatever comments will always be repeated in the cafeteria, dorms, coffee place, etc. maybe i am being very naïve, but i don't understand how a podcast really changes this dynamic. it will continue as long as there are universities.

also, the simple idea of a very large audience downloading an academic lecture from iTunes... i don't mean it in a nasty way _at all_ but that seems like self-flattery to me. or paranoia? shit, most students don't even read a given course's textbooks. hear a podcast when they could hear music instead? how many students would even do that? i can see how a podcast would be useful if you were enrolled in a class and missed a lecture, but: students external to the course? or even other academics: who has that kind of time?! it seems like only a very, very small number of people would bother downloading podcasts from courses in which they're not enrolled. am i incorrect? am i missing some new trend?

also, what about students who bring dictators to class? other devices also offer the chance to share, and i knew a lot of students who brought dictators to their classes. i know that's different in some aspects, but it is the same in others.

i finished my M.A. in 2003, pre-podcast [though i carried a first-gen iPod around with me, starting as soon as the iPod debuted]. so, i apologise if my comments and questions are 'of another era' etc. in closing, i definitely prefer _non_-DRM-encoded files by principle, but i'm really unfamiliar with this academic 'free for all' [not a derogatory term] described here by some commenters. is it really that easy to attend college classes for a small fraction of the cost? or for FREE? and on a regular basis?

xo, math+

So yeah, most college classes I know of let anyone come in and sit through it. You don't pay for classes, you pay for the piece of paper at the end of your education.

I know that we aren't doing anything with iTunes U for this exact reason. Not because we want to keep our own content under wraps, but because the instructors that are most interested in using this want to use it as a storehouse for copyrighted material. We have spent a tremendous amount music resources that our music department would love to make available across the university, but unless we can protect them in some way, we legally can't do this.

I can't tell from Jay's article *who* is demanding DRM. Is it the tech transfer people or is it faculty? The distinction is critical. Tech transfer administrators are committed to making money from the intellectual property generated by faculty. They are not committed to education, learning, research, inquiry, or academic freedom. If the DRM demand is coming from tech transfer people, then there's a good chance that (at many universities) faculty can rouse themselves, express a different preference, and prevail. Tech transfer offices generally focus on patentable discoveries, not copyrighted lectures or publications, and they might well back down if faculty and the academic side of the administration spoke up clearly.

Mark - "The sense of entitlement among the anti-DRM crowd is palpable, and more than a little offensive. You want to know what I teach in class? Prove you're worthy of it -- get yourself admitted to the University and sit through my class."

Fine don't put your classes on Itunes U. Don't want your classes to exposed to other academics? Again, fine don't put your classes on Itunes U.

Your self importance is projecting here a bit, "the sense of entitlement among the anti-DRM crowd is palpable". Anti-DRM people are anti-DRM because it does not work, and that it impedes the fair-use (legitimate use) of any material purchased through honest means.

Fairplay DRM is vendor locked to Ipod. The new ZUNE player will not play any previous "Play-for-Sure" content. Sony DRM cannot be played in any player but a Sony player. The only consistent thing that a user can be guaranteed about DRM is that it will be cracked and it not interoperable.

In choosing a flavour of DRM you are choosing a vendor-locked in solution that is about as useful securing your bike with a u-lock that can be picked with a bic pen.

DRM is not about security, it has always been cracked, it is about making people who don't now any better feel secure.

When considering the addition of DRM, I hope they take into account those people with disabilities who use special devices. Adobe PDF accessibility doesn't agree with many of the special devices currently in use, and the addition of DRM to Microsoft Reader contents locks out many screen readers with proper permission to use the work. After all, many of these universities and colleges are publicly funded.

This is so foolish; DRM is a *placebo*.

All it takes is one student to use an easily avalable program to strip the DRM from your lectures, and it is over, your lectures will be public property.

DRM has never, ever, effectively done what it was intended to do, to prevent redistribution of content.
Despite what DRM pushers tell you, DRM is complete snake oil.

Whenever someone tries releasing "exclusive" content onto the internet, with the false sense of security provided by DRM, it always ends up on youtube!

Argue about the morality all you want, but the simple fact is is that there is no scarcity on the internet and you can't manufacture it with clumsy DRM, so we should all just live with it.

It appears that the author of comment #4 could use a wake up call. Try this URL: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/index.htm

MIT did not wait around for any stinkin' iPod before taking its courses to the world.