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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?

I give up. Maybe I am just not geek enough, but I just can’t deal with the flood of nonsense that comes over my twitter account from folks like Scoble, Laporte and Calacanis. They have a unique opportunity to tell me cool things, inspire me to think differently, guide me toward ideas and people I might not otherwise know.  But after two weeks I’m just flat out disappointed (perhaps let down) in the way they seem to take advantage of the power they have. If anyone hears anything interesting from their twitter streams, let me know. I have untwittered them….for now.

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.

So, I’ve been following Jason Calacanis on Twitter. I guess he’s in charge of Mahalo and one of those individuals who seems to have much more money and recognition after the end of the dot-com era than when he entered. Recently, in his quest to raise awareness about Twitter’s awesomeness, he decided to see if he could become the most popular “actual” member of Twitter. (Okay, so Barack Obama is the most popular member but I’m not convinced he’s actually twittering. Barak?)

Calacanis’ main goal has been to reach 20,000 followers before any other “actual” twitterer. And get this, if he does, he’ll pick one of his followers (at random) and provide that individual with a Macbook Air. Cool.

There’s an interesting twist to this, though. Even though Calacanis has 700 more followers than the nearest twitterer, Robert Skoble (19,334 to 18,399), he’s lost his lead to a journalist who’s now quickly closing in on 20,000. Check out the last month’s statistics here: Who is this guy?

His name is Leo Laporte. He has a radio talk show called the Tech Guys Labs and maintains a pretty active blog at Leoville.com. I don’t know much about him. What I do know, though, is that if Leo “wins” my chances of winning that Air are nil!! How many people have decreased my chances by actually following Leo as well as Calacanis? (me, admittedly).

Now, this whole affair has me thinking about a few things. a). the competitive nature of this leads me to wonder about the more nuanced aspects of this “Generative Technology”. (check out this post for an interesting discussion about Jonathan Zittrain ’s concept of sterile and generative technologies). It’s fascinating that people like myself (and 20,000 other people I guess) actually receive updates from Calacanis and Leo each and every day. Calacanis and Laporte have my attention in a way that no other stranger ever has before. I let them interrupt what I am doing, I anticipate an announcement, read through their posts. I am a true consumer.

I ask: What’s after the Air? 

So, it’s official. Pieter and I finally have an office space for the Open.Michigan OER initiative - a place where we can actually have our own desk space, our own phone lines, leave thoughts written out on the white boards, call meetings with the rest of the team, and even brew our own pot of coffee.

Here’s Piet and Tim chatting at Piet’s desk about our eduCommons set up - the virtual space where we’re currently placing course content for the OER initiative.