Universities – USC especially – are at a crossroads: Do they exist to promote scholarship, or do they exist to protect the business models of entertainment companies at any cost?
As students were returning to the USC campus for the 2006-2007 year, they were sent an ominous memo on “Copyright Compliance,” signed by Michael Pearce, USC deputy chief information officer and Michael L. Jackson, vice president for Student Affairs.
This extraordinary document set out a bizarre, nonlegal view of copyright’s intent and the university’s purpose, and made it clear that in its authors’ views, scholarship takes a backseat to copyright.
Copyright is a bargain. It grants some exclusive rights to authors and reserves the remaining rights to the public. The Constitution’s framers were clear on this issue, having lived through the evils of monopolies endowed by the king in pre-Revolutionary times. They knew that granting monopolies to authors and their publishers was a dangerous business because the goods of knowledge are the core of scholarship, criticism, innovation and free speech.
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