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This has to be a new low for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Read about the brilliant strategy of suing a homeless man for infringement here. Sure, infringement is infringement; but remind me again how suing children, the elderly, dead people, and homeless individuals really helps its image? Understandably, the RIAA follows IP addresses to people, but could it be that the legal team is starting to realize just how absurd the lawsuit strategy is and doing things like this to bring on its own demise?

Today’s New York Times ran an article about a fascinating lawsuit being filed against Georgia State University by three large academic publishers: Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications. The publishers contend that Georgia State University professors have engaged in “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” and that these faculty members ought to obtain permission and pay licensing fees to utilize the copyrighted works.

What’s interesting about this lawsuit is that members of educational institutions - including faculty and students - have been granted the right to copy and distribute substantial portions of copyrighted works for the purpose of teaching, discussion, scholarship, and research; this is what is known as educational fair use. Unlike the general fair use principle outlined by the 1976 Copyright Act, the principles guiding educational fair use are something of a “treaty” between publishers and educators - an agreement to provide “greater certainty and protection” to members of the academic community. According to the aforementioned publishers, Georgia State University faculty have violated that treaty, copying and distributing much more copyrighted work than acceptable under the agreed upon guidelines.

This will certainly be a worthwhile story to watch. Here at the University of Michigan, we have been discussing the notion of fair use in the context of Open Educational Resources initiatives. And, while the New York Times article rightly points out how most lawsuits of this sort are resolved during litigation, I can only hope that whatever does come of this will help bring new light to the need for a rigorous discussion about fair use and digital media, fair use and the digital age.