Professor Howard Besser of New York University is offering a course at the Tisch School of Arts this Spring entitled Free Culture & Open Access, and he’s released the syllabus online. It’s such a good list of introductory sources (and speakers) on the free culture movement that we wanted to point to it from here:
besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Classes/14free-culture-syllabus.pdf
Several QCO articles, and the work of our Artist-in-Residence Nina Paley, are listed in the syllabus. Also very nice to see is the trouble Prof. Besser took toward the end of the syllabus to define plagiarism accurately and not confuse it with mere unauthorized copying (simply put: copying a song is not the same as claiming you wrote it!). As we wrote back in 2007, this is not something NYU has always been clear on, though to be fair, the current Tisch School of the Arts Academic Integrity Policy seems to have thought about it more carefully.
We asked Prof. Besser “Will you be suggesting to the students that they release their own papers for the course under non-restrictive licenses?” and got a delightful answer:
Since 1994 I’ve been asking my students to make all their work for my classes publicly available
http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/impact/ (choose “Student Papers”)
http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/studentwork.shtml
We are now transitioning into explicit CC licenses.
It appears the students are in good hands! Best of luck to Prof. Besser and the class.