Thoughts About Copyright

I found yesterday's copyright discussion both very interesting and very enlightening. One of the things I found most interesting was just how much college campuses are targeted for internet piracy. I remember being told during orientation last fall that it was much more likely that you would be caught illegally downloading at school than at home, but until yesterday I didn't really understand just what that meant. I found it really surprising that every day, the library receives multiple take-down notices, and even more so that Trinity has been subpoenaed to release the names of students in RIAA cases four different times! I find it quite surreal to think about people from my very own school being sued for thousands of dollars for illegally downloading even as few as 10-12 songs. I also found it quite interesting that only 4% of internet piracy takes place on college campuses, but that so much of the anti-piracy efforts are directed at catching college students in the act. Not only does it strike me as somewhat counter intuitive to put so much effort into such a small percentage of offenders, but I was surprised that it really is only 4% that happens at universities. It seems to me that college students would download a lot more than that, especially given the "starving college student" stereotype.


One copyright issue that was especially personal for me was that once an author publishes their work in a journal, they no longer hold the copyright for that work. As a beginning chemistry researcher, it is my goal to eventually (and hopefully before I graduate from Trinity) publish in a chemical journal. I can understand why it would be important for a journal to have rights to an article it publishes, in case of legal issues that might come up, and because they are putting their name and reputation on the work they publish. At the same time, though, I think it's important for the author to be able to have the rights to their own work, and for the university that the researching author works for to be able to obtain that publication without having to pay the incredibly high fees universities have to pay for journals. Depending on the price of the journal, the university might not even be able to pay for the journal. I find that to be incredibly unfair. It is more than just the work of one person to produce a scholarly article- entire departments put in tremendous amounts of effort in order to publish an article. For that university to not even be able to afford the journal that article is in is completely unjust. I think that the best solution would be to find some sort of "happy medium" where both the journal and the author share a copyright. Hopefully if the Creative Commons continue to grow in popularity, this will be able to happen!