I’ve been teaching my students about copyright for years, but now I have a personal experience to help make it real. If you’re an educator who teaches students about copyright, this would make a great story to use in your class, too. It’s controversial, it’s got two sides, and it’s on the cutting edge of law and ethics.

Here’s my time line of the situation:

August 27, 2007–I write this post about an email I received from Scribd:

• SFWA Accuses Teen Literacy of Copyright Violation

August 28, 2007–The editors of Ray Gun Revival write their own post about how the back issues of their magazine were removed from Scribd:

• SFWA Issues Misguided Takedowns at Scribd

August 30, 2007–Science fiction writer (and member of the SFWA) Cory Doctorow writes a terrific article about the issue on Boing Boing, the second most-linked-to-blog in the world:

• Science Fiction Writers of America Abuses the DMCA

Also on August 30–Michael Capobianco, SFWA president, begins leaving comments on blogs, apologizing for the erroneous DMCA notices.

• Teen Literacy Tips Apology
• Ray Gun Revival Apology

August 31, 2007–Ars Technica, another top ten blog, has this to say:

• Worse than Vogon poetry: bogus DMCA takedowns stun sci-fi lovers

August 31, 2007–Michael Capobianco, SFWA president, issues this statement on the SFWA web site:

• The Official SFWA Statement Regarding Removal of Works from Scribd

September 1, 2007–Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney for Scribd, sends the following letter to SFWA Vice President Dr. Andrew Burt:

• Scribd’s Official Response to the SFWA

**Update September 3, 2007–The SWFA Board passes a motion to disband the ePiracy Committee:

• SWFA ePiracy Committee Activities Suspended

**Update September 11, 2007–Scribd president Jared Friedman re-enables my list of 300+ Recommended Books for Junior High Students after not hearing back from the SFWA about my counter-notification.

I’ll continue to update this time line as new developments occur.

If you decide to share this with your students, here are some more copyright resources:

• A fantastic ten-lesson unit for junior high students for creating public service announcements on copyright awareness from ReadWriteThink.org and the National Council of Teachers of English
• An overview of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from the UCLA Online Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy
• Text of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on Wikisource
• A Crash Course in Copyright from the University of Texas System
• A somewhat dated but still useful guide to Fair Use and Copyright for Teachers from Cathy Newsome

Quick Review

If something is in the public domain–literature, art, music–then, as the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Guide states, “it is not protected by intellectual property laws…which means it’s free for you to use without permission.”

The Stanford guide explains that most books enter the public domain because their copyrights have expired.  These books include “any work published in the United States before 1923.” Other works may be released into the public domain by the author or creator. The volunteers at Librivox.org, for instance, record audio books of public domain texts and release the recordings into the public domain.

Public Domain Literature in Schools

Thanks to sites like Project Gutenberg and Librivox, there is an ever-growing repository of public domain materials that we can use in our classrooms at little to no cost. Last year I used short stories by Chekhov, Hugo, Poe and Tolstoy, to name a few.

I photocopied the stories and poems and asked students to put them in their three-ring binders, creating a dynamic textbook that grew as the year progressed. We do have a literature anthology at my school, which we used occasionally, but students can’t mark up a page with their notes as they can with the photocopied public domain texts.

Using public domain texts also allows me the freedom to change stories from year to year. I’m not dependent on the stories in the literature anthology. There are, however two big disadvantages to using public domain texts.

Disadvantages

First, relying solely on public domain texts means you are limited to teaching older, mostly Euro-centric material. Books like Bless Me, Ultima, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Fahrenheit 451, To Kill a Mockingbird or Ender’s Game are not yet in the public domain, and teaching these books requires that they be purchased. Still, there are enough high-interest titles in the public domain to teach students how to read well.

Second, there are no teaching materials when you use public domain texts. Anthologies come with study questions, vocabulary words and other teaching ideas. With public domain texts you must either buy ancillary materials, find resources on the Internet or create your own materials. I actually believe this is an advantage, since it frees the teacher from dependence on someone else’s interpretation of the text. I think we give students too many study questions and vocabulary words. Hand them the text, show them how good readers read, and let them get to work on it, discussing it with them as they go.

Conclusion

I have a lot more to say about how to use public domain literature in the classroom, but for now I’ll close by linking to a recommended reading list of public domain titles that could be used in a junior high or high school classroom. There are almost seventy titles on the list, but I could have listed seven hundred. This is just a beginning. There is no poetry or drama on the list, so you won’t see authors like Walt Whitman or William Shakespeare, though their works, too, are in the public domain.

If you decide to use public domain texts, be sure to read Prepare a Gutenberg Text for eReading from Lifehacker. It will show you how to make the Gutenberg texts readable and printable.

I call the list “Open Source Literature” because, similar to programs like Firefox and Linux, users can take these texts and adapt them, change them and use them in any way they want.

Here, then is the link to Open Source Literature.

The only thing I can figure is that since I read some of their books ten years ago when I made the list, they think I just copied titles and called it good. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have spent over seventeen years teaching literature to junior high students, and in that time have formulated my own opinions regarding what teens like to read.

I contacted Scribd this afternoon, and Jared Friedman, president of Scribd, has already replied to my email, directing me to file something called a counter-notification, which I have done. Hopefully the matter will be cleared up shortly.

If I have violated copyright unintentionally I will correct the matter and post a new list. But I can’t for the life of me imagine how my personally developed list could violate copyright.

And I’m not sure what the SFWA has to gain by requesting that the list be removed. That list does nothing but encourage people to buy their books. I don’t know if Cory Doctorow is a member of the SFWA, but I’m going to send him an email and let him know about the situation to see what he thinks. He’s been advocate for Creative Commons ebooks for awhile and he might be interested in this.

Regardless, I guess I’ll take it as a compliment that what I’m doing here is attracting some attention.

What do you think? If you’ve seen my list, do you think it violates copyright? And if you’re the member of the SFWA who reported it, maybe you could provide some explanation of what exactly I did wrong.