Sean Lovelace—
Does anyone here give a flying fuck about copyright when they make copies of _______ to teach students?
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Meta
are you talking about photocopies or something? because as far as i know you can photocopy whatever for classroom use and it’s not bound by copyright laws.
then again, perhaps i misunderstand the question…
No, no, you got it. Is that true? ANYTHING?
How do all these people approach me to make “packets” and say to me, “We’ll take care of the copyright” for you.
Is there no copyright fee at all, no matter what the work, how long, etc?
I’m asking.
If it is true, sorry for the irrelevant question, folks.
I am nothing if not irrelevant inquiry. I mean I should copyright that.
S
I don’t know the rule, but I do know that there’s a huge difference–in someone’s mind–between “Matt puts together a packet of stories, photocopies them, and hands them out in class” and “Matt puts together a packet of stories, has the bookstore/school library photocopy them, and then has students pick the copies up at the bookstore.” I don’t remember how the rules work, or if it’s just a case of the university covering its ass, but there’s definitely something there that my pedagogy professor discussed for a long time without me ever really understanding.
Honestly, I just solved the problem by supplementing my text with stuff that was online. I understood the issues there, the students never “lost” my handouts, and there’s an awful lot on the internet that fit what I wanted.
The law actually does restrict your ability to make a packet, as I understand it. Individual pieces doled out one at a time don’t have as many restrictions (just normal fair use) and in practice no one cares. Personally I don’t worry about it. A reasonable universe will allow my students to read a selection from a book. It will, damn it!
And I just can’t stand the idea of going over to anthologies.
It’s true, as far as I understand copyright law. At least it was true a few years ago, when someone used some of my photos without permission for a lecture promoting creation science, which I found out about by doing a google search for myself one idle afternoon. I contacted him, he sent me the appropriate language from the law, I double-checked it. There was nothing I could do, because he was using the images strictly for educational purposes. I could have asked him to stop, but I found the whole thing sort of amusing.
Good call on the internet, Matt.
I have also found any teaching point I’ve made could easily just lead to a link.
This also gets a person/teacher away from “Let’s teach The Things They Carried.” Why?
Oh, because everyone teaches that story.
I hate anthologies that anthologize stories because, uh, that story was anthologized.
Yep, that is exactly the rub as far as copyright goes–the idea, I think, being that if you’re having the library photocopy stories for you, then 1) you are cutting it closer on the “spontaneity” clause of fair use than someone who’s photocopying stories one at a time, on demand instead of ahead of time, and 2) someone (the library, the bookstore) is making money off of these copied stories, so someone else (the publisher, the author) should be getting money as if that part of the book was purchased. Which is why if you go through the proper channels to get a course packet put together, the cost of the library going through agencies to get copyright clearance can get really pricey.
I’ve been going nuts about this since I started teaching creative writing this semester. I kind of care about copyright, want to follow the rules, etc., but the law makes it really really really hard for instructors to plan and assemble a packet of readings ahead of time.
A better question is why the hell are you photocopying anyway? Are you standing in a dank room flipping pages over that hot oven while your colleagues stand in line waiting to do their own low-fi printing?
I guarantee your U has an electronic reserves at the library. You give them a copy of the story, they make an electronic copy and they will also be sure they aren’t breaking any rules by doing so. Your students will be able to access, download, print. Saves you time. Saves your department resources.
Fair use has limits. You aren’t allowed to use more than two chapters of a book. Equivalent is two stories in an anthology or collection. There are also limits to how much you can quote in a published work without the permission of the author / publisher.
Also, consider this. If short stories collections don’t sell, and these well-known time-tested authors are getting into anthologies, it’s one way for the publisher and the writer to almost break even. We all like the idea of writers getting paid. Your allowed to do it, but more than two stories from any book is considered an abuse.
And ummm, people use The Things They Carried because it’s a great story / collection. The likes of which we haven’t really seen in a long while. TOB was doing interesting things. He was pulling it off. You may be tired of it but your students will love it. They can learn a lot from The Things.
Anthologies aren’t necessarily bad. From your students’ perspective, they can be a cheap fix. Most of them won’t be familiar with more than a few stories from the ‘canon’ of contemporary short fiction. There are affordable and fat anthologies with editors like Toby Wolff, J.C. Oates, Michael Martone, Richard Ford. These are people who love stories and can put together a great collection of 500-600 pages for $15 – $20. You may be over it but your students will love you for it.
As far as copying and handing out one short story, you’re OK. But the rules and the lawsuits were because profs used to put together packets at Kinkos indiscriminately and all that was paid for was photocopies. I’m sure that however cavalier your attitudes about copyright are, you wouldn’t support a corporation like Kinkos making money off publishers like it was the Wild West. Photocopy companies also have to pay copyright, esp. in U libraries. So that twenty cents per page, some of that is somehow divvied up. It’s an imperfect system but supposedly in the service of education.
And of course the other issue is the web. It seems a free internet cannot coexist with copyright as it stands. It means you are spying on folks to enforce current law, or you find some other way.
But there’s lots of great writing on the web you can also use for free (I know I don’t need to tell you this).
While it would be technically legal to put together an exact copy of the Dzanc Best of the Web, and give those links to your students, would it be ethical? I think some hard-working saints of the underground would possibly be a little steamed. So what the profs in the old days were doing was a kind of similar, with the exception that books went out of print and were harder to get, and that academic books can cost $100-$150 per book. They were using their personal libraries to give the best personalized education they could. It was just at the expense of other writers and scholars.
I don’t care, but at the same time I think it is a good thing to make students buy actual books and support these writers (a lot cheaper than the tons they will be forced to shell out for pointless textbooks anyway). Obviously if you are covering a lot of stuff, you can’t have them buy everything, but maybe you can make them buy one or two and copy the rest.
technically you can photocopy for students w/o securing copyright under the “one-time-use” policy, ie only for a semester. some schools are really uptight about photocopying, and want to go through the copyright process which can be $, some are too lax and never care about copyright, i’ve noticed. but you can only always photocopy a specific percentage of the whole book, for copyright or “one-time-use”. besides linking to the internet, university libraries will do electronic reserve, which means they’ll scan the part of the work (if it’s under the certain percentage) and make a PDF of it, and then students can log in to the library site and access the PDF and print it out.
Thanks John, Kate. I thought it was a bit more complicated.
And, John, I hear you. though I no longer teach anthologies, I certainly teach anthologized stories, at times.
But TTTC, as great as it as a story, needs to have a reprieve.
Teaching the collection is a whole different thing. The collection has variety, formally and with language and with theme.
TTTC is just to easy. If you really love it, teach it once every 2 years.
Any point you want to make you could make with another story, every other year.
Yes?
yes.
I mean too easy but I’m also on ouzo
I don’t know…those lists in The Things…
No one without the experience + the sensibility as a writer could have written that. It’s kind of a rare combination.
For your own sanity, however, change up the readings, yes. There aren’t too many stories one would never tire of.
I agree with your point about anthologies. Most of my students haven’t read O’Brien or Barthelme or Kincaid or Baldwin or JCO. An anthology solves that, and I can supplement the reading list with things from the web and hand-outs on the side.
I think I said so above, but I teach an anthology myself. I love anthologies. (I mean, obviously, I edit one, so I must, right?) I’m only supplementing it with outside material. Although clearly, Sal and I are teaching completely different anthologies…
“I hate anthologies that anthologize stories because, uh, that story was anthologized.”
Right? That’s the problem with the one line of anthologies (Is it the Scribner?). Because the selections are voted in by MFA professors, it tends to be a bit self-reinforcing. They already know what stories go in anthologies. (And no, this isn’t a bash on professors, etc., etc., nor MFA progams. I’m just saying that there isn’t that strong central personality picking the stories, that tends to make for the better anthologies– Not everything can or should be crowd-sourced.)
I try to find stuff available online but if I need to make a PDF I certainly do so.
Am I the only one not bothered by profs indiscriminately tossing together curriculum packets at Kinkos?
I wish they would Kinko entire books, if that’s what had to happen.
Of all the drinking stories I can tell, only one involves ouzo, but it’s a doozie. It involves, among other things, a one-armed man and barfing into the Mediterranean.
This is just straight up false information.
are you talking about photocopies or something? because as far as i know you can photocopy whatever for classroom use and it’s not bound by copyright laws.
then again, perhaps i misunderstand the question…
it’s one thing for bo jackson or neon deion to talk about themselves in the third person, but it’s damn creepy and disappointing to see a fine gent like Matt Bell jump into that realm. even weirder to see it happen in real time.
No, no, you got it. Is that true? ANYTHING?
How do all these people approach me to make “packets” and say to me, “We’ll take care of the copyright” for you.
Is there no copyright fee at all, no matter what the work, how long, etc?
I’m asking.
If it is true, sorry for the irrelevant question, folks.
I am nothing if not irrelevant inquiry. I mean I should copyright that.
S
there ought to be a searchable database that people licensing under creative commons could list their work under.
I don’t know the rule, but I do know that there’s a huge difference–in someone’s mind–between “Matt puts together a packet of stories, photocopies them, and hands them out in class” and “Matt puts together a packet of stories, has the bookstore/school library photocopy them, and then has students pick the copies up at the bookstore.” I don’t remember how the rules work, or if it’s just a case of the university covering its ass, but there’s definitely something there that my pedagogy professor discussed for a long time without me ever really understanding.
Honestly, I just solved the problem by supplementing my text with stuff that was online. I understood the issues there, the students never “lost” my handouts, and there’s an awful lot on the internet that fit what I wanted.
The law actually does restrict your ability to make a packet, as I understand it. Individual pieces doled out one at a time don’t have as many restrictions (just normal fair use) and in practice no one cares. Personally I don’t worry about it. A reasonable universe will allow my students to read a selection from a book. It will, damn it!
And I just can’t stand the idea of going over to anthologies.
It’s true, as far as I understand copyright law. At least it was true a few years ago, when someone used some of my photos without permission for a lecture promoting creation science, which I found out about by doing a google search for myself one idle afternoon. I contacted him, he sent me the appropriate language from the law, I double-checked it. There was nothing I could do, because he was using the images strictly for educational purposes. I could have asked him to stop, but I found the whole thing sort of amusing.
Good call on the internet, Matt.
I have also found any teaching point I’ve made could easily just lead to a link.
This also gets a person/teacher away from “Let’s teach The Things They Carried.” Why?
Oh, because everyone teaches that story.
I hate anthologies that anthologize stories because, uh, that story was anthologized.
Yep, that is exactly the rub as far as copyright goes–the idea, I think, being that if you’re having the library photocopy stories for you, then 1) you are cutting it closer on the “spontaneity” clause of fair use than someone who’s photocopying stories one at a time, on demand instead of ahead of time, and 2) someone (the library, the bookstore) is making money off of these copied stories, so someone else (the publisher, the author) should be getting money as if that part of the book was purchased. Which is why if you go through the proper channels to get a course packet put together, the cost of the library going through agencies to get copyright clearance can get really pricey.
I’ve been going nuts about this since I started teaching creative writing this semester. I kind of care about copyright, want to follow the rules, etc., but the law makes it really really really hard for instructors to plan and assemble a packet of readings ahead of time.
I don’t teach, but I know from being taught that I appreciate the course packet, online, printed, whatever. If there’s a good anthology to teach, sure, but there’s a freedom to the course packet in terms of saying, “Hey, since we had a really good discussion about ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbitis Tertius’ last week, let’s skip the Barthelme story for next week and do another Borges. Everyone okay with that?”
I don’t think students should be made to buy the whole of Borges’ collected ficcionnes just for “Tlon,” nor the whole of Barthelme’s Sixty stories just for “Shower of Gold.” But might I buy both of those collections on my lonesome bc I first encounter those in a course packet? Sure. Which makes those course packets free advertising of a sort.
A better question is why the hell are you photocopying anyway? Are you standing in a dank room flipping pages over that hot oven while your colleagues stand in line waiting to do their own low-fi printing?
I guarantee your U has an electronic reserves at the library. You give them a copy of the story, they make an electronic copy and they will also be sure they aren’t breaking any rules by doing so. Your students will be able to access, download, print. Saves you time. Saves your department resources.
Fair use has limits. You aren’t allowed to use more than two chapters of a book. Equivalent is two stories in an anthology or collection. There are also limits to how much you can quote in a published work without the permission of the author / publisher.
Also, consider this. If short stories collections don’t sell, and these well-known time-tested authors are getting into anthologies, it’s one way for the publisher and the writer to almost break even. We all like the idea of writers getting paid. Your allowed to do it, but more than two stories from any book is considered an abuse.
And ummm, people use The Things They Carried because it’s a great story / collection. The likes of which we haven’t really seen in a long while. TOB was doing interesting things. He was pulling it off. You may be tired of it but your students will love it. They can learn a lot from The Things.
Anthologies aren’t necessarily bad. From your students’ perspective, they can be a cheap fix. Most of them won’t be familiar with more than a few stories from the ‘canon’ of contemporary short fiction. There are affordable and fat anthologies with editors like Toby Wolff, J.C. Oates, Michael Martone, Richard Ford. These are people who love stories and can put together a great collection of 500-600 pages for $15 – $20. You may be over it but your students will love you for it.
As far as copying and handing out one short story, you’re OK. But the rules and the lawsuits were because profs used to put together packets at Kinkos indiscriminately and all that was paid for was photocopies. I’m sure that however cavalier your attitudes about copyright are, you wouldn’t support a corporation like Kinkos making money off publishers like it was the Wild West. Photocopy companies also have to pay copyright, esp. in U libraries. So that twenty cents per page, some of that is somehow divvied up. It’s an imperfect system but supposedly in the service of education.
And of course the other issue is the web. It seems a free internet cannot coexist with copyright as it stands. It means you are spying on folks to enforce current law, or you find some other way.
But there’s lots of great writing on the web you can also use for free (I know I don’t need to tell you this).
While it would be technically legal to put together an exact copy of the Dzanc Best of the Web, and give those links to your students, would it be ethical? I think some hard-working saints of the underground would possibly be a little steamed. So what the profs in the old days were doing was a kind of similar, with the exception that books went out of print and were harder to get, and that academic books can cost $100-$150 per book. They were using their personal libraries to give the best personalized education they could. It was just at the expense of other writers and scholars.
I don’t care, but at the same time I think it is a good thing to make students buy actual books and support these writers (a lot cheaper than the tons they will be forced to shell out for pointless textbooks anyway). Obviously if you are covering a lot of stuff, you can’t have them buy everything, but maybe you can make them buy one or two and copy the rest.
technically you can photocopy for students w/o securing copyright under the “one-time-use” policy, ie only for a semester. some schools are really uptight about photocopying, and want to go through the copyright process which can be $, some are too lax and never care about copyright, i’ve noticed. but you can only always photocopy a specific percentage of the whole book, for copyright or “one-time-use”. besides linking to the internet, university libraries will do electronic reserve, which means they’ll scan the part of the work (if it’s under the certain percentage) and make a PDF of it, and then students can log in to the library site and access the PDF and print it out.
That was less me talking in the third person than me imagining university administrators talking about me, which, to be honest, is just as unlikely a scenario.
Anthologies are overpriced and heavy and even the best are pumped up with filler like a bodybuilder using “legal” steroids. The future belongs to the individualized course packet, just as with music the album has ceded largely to the track. A course packet is like a mixed tape made by a prof–every piece meaningful, and you don’t have to flip past tepid simulated “outlines” or lug 6,000 canonical poems stuffed into a “sampler” around all semester. Good topic, though, Sean, as photocopying brings a lot of unnecessary stress every semester that might be better spent doing x number of things for students. I like this electronic scanning business–never really looked into it but will now.
Joseph Y:
I think what you’re talking about is pretty close to what Google is trying to do. Only they will be making $ and most authors never gave permission.
Also: if you want to supplement with stories, they can also be found when the original mags are on ( paid but free for students ) electronic databases like J-stor or Infotrac. All those anthologized stories came out first in NYer or Ploughshares, and the databases usually have them.
Matt:
The Scribner actually substituted some of the stuff that got voted in when they were already too heavily anthologized, so instead of Cathedral they picked a lesser known Carver as a substitute. Yeah, we’re familiar with the stories, but if someone gave you that book when you were 19 or 20 it would have rocked your world.
Thanks John, Kate. I thought it was a bit more complicated.
And, John, I hear you. though I no longer teach anthologies, I certainly teach anthologized stories, at times.
But TTTC, as great as it as a story, needs to have a reprieve.
Teaching the collection is a whole different thing. The collection has variety, formally and with language and with theme.
TTTC is just to easy. If you really love it, teach it once every 2 years.
Any point you want to make you could make with another story, every other year.
Yes?
yes.
I mean too easy but I’m also on ouzo
I don’t know…those lists in The Things…
No one without the experience + the sensibility as a writer could have written that. It’s kind of a rare combination.
For your own sanity, however, change up the readings, yes. There aren’t too many stories one would never tire of.
I agree with your point about anthologies. Most of my students haven’t read O’Brien or Barthelme or Kincaid or Baldwin or JCO. An anthology solves that, and I can supplement the reading list with things from the web and hand-outs on the side.
no.
I think I said so above, but I teach an anthology myself. I love anthologies. (I mean, obviously, I edit one, so I must, right?) I’m only supplementing it with outside material. Although clearly, Sal and I are teaching completely different anthologies…
“I hate anthologies that anthologize stories because, uh, that story was anthologized.”
Right? That’s the problem with the one line of anthologies (Is it the Scribner?). Because the selections are voted in by MFA professors, it tends to be a bit self-reinforcing. They already know what stories go in anthologies. (And no, this isn’t a bash on professors, etc., etc., nor MFA progams. I’m just saying that there isn’t that strong central personality picking the stories, that tends to make for the better anthologies– Not everything can or should be crowd-sourced.)
I try to find stuff available online but if I need to make a PDF I certainly do so.
Am I the only one not bothered by profs indiscriminately tossing together curriculum packets at Kinkos?
I wish they would Kinko entire books, if that’s what had to happen.
Of all the drinking stories I can tell, only one involves ouzo, but it’s a doozie. It involves, among other things, a one-armed man and barfing into the Mediterranean.
This is just straight up false information.
it’s one thing for bo jackson or neon deion to talk about themselves in the third person, but it’s damn creepy and disappointing to see a fine gent like Matt Bell jump into that realm. even weirder to see it happen in real time.
there ought to be a searchable database that people licensing under creative commons could list their work under.
I don’t teach, but I know from being taught that I appreciate the course packet, online, printed, whatever. If there’s a good anthology to teach, sure, but there’s a freedom to the course packet in terms of saying, “Hey, since we had a really good discussion about ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbitis Tertius’ last week, let’s skip the Barthelme story for next week and do another Borges. Everyone okay with that?”
I don’t think students should be made to buy the whole of Borges’ collected ficcionnes just for “Tlon,” nor the whole of Barthelme’s Sixty stories just for “Shower of Gold.” But might I buy both of those collections on my lonesome bc I first encounter those in a course packet? Sure. Which makes those course packets free advertising of a sort.
That was less me talking in the third person than me imagining university administrators talking about me, which, to be honest, is just as unlikely a scenario.
Anthologies are overpriced and heavy and even the best are pumped up with filler like a bodybuilder using “legal” steroids. The future belongs to the individualized course packet, just as with music the album has ceded largely to the track. A course packet is like a mixed tape made by a prof–every piece meaningful, and you don’t have to flip past tepid simulated “outlines” or lug 6,000 canonical poems stuffed into a “sampler” around all semester. Good topic, though, Sean, as photocopying brings a lot of unnecessary stress every semester that might be better spent doing x number of things for students. I like this electronic scanning business–never really looked into it but will now.
Joseph Y:
I think what you’re talking about is pretty close to what Google is trying to do. Only they will be making $ and most authors never gave permission.
Also: if you want to supplement with stories, they can also be found when the original mags are on ( paid but free for students ) electronic databases like J-stor or Infotrac. All those anthologized stories came out first in NYer or Ploughshares, and the databases usually have them.
Matt:
The Scribner actually substituted some of the stuff that got voted in when they were already too heavily anthologized, so instead of Cathedral they picked a lesser known Carver as a substitute. Yeah, we’re familiar with the stories, but if someone gave you that book when you were 19 or 20 it would have rocked your world.
no.
Middlebury College called these ‘course packets’ and made you pay for them in the bookstore. I use to refuse on the grounds it was illegal to profit it off of others work. I was told that the cost was to cover the printing fee. I laughed and bought a bag of weed with my money instead.
I would kill for the privilege of never having read Kincaid, O’Brien, or JCO.
And I would kill for the privilege of never having read this.
Um, he used quotes? And teh original third-person-talkers were Bob Dole and Al Gore
You can photocopy from books for classes, but the deal is that you are supposed to write at the bottom where you photocopied it from.
If it’s more than a few pages and you are using it for more than one course, it is best to ask permission from the author/publisher.
John Minichillo: Yes! If your institution has access to JSTOR, EBSCO or other online databases, you can ask your students to find the stories there. It’s good for students to be aware of these resources anyway.
If you are putting together a printed packet for class (that is sold in the bookstore), most university bookstores will be pretty strict about getting permission from the original publisher for reprint rights. It’s not really a huge source of income for lit mags, but it seems fair if they’re going to sell them.
JAMES THAT IS INCREDIBLY VIOLENT
Regardless of your opinion of them, these are all people whose work young writers should know about. They’re important parts of literary history. If you want to throw out what they’ve done in your own work, then great. I certainly don’t think that every aforementioned writer is amazing, but that’s because I know their work and learned what I appreciated/hated about their very disparate aesthetics. I think it’s important to mix the contemporary with the vanguards of literary history.
What anthology are you using? I’m going with 3X33.
Middlebury College called these ‘course packets’ and made you pay for them in the bookstore. I use to refuse on the grounds it was illegal to profit it off of others work. I was told that the cost was to cover the printing fee. I laughed and bought a bag of weed with my money instead.
I would kill for the privilege of never having read Kincaid, O’Brien, or JCO.
And I would kill for the privilege of never having read this.
Um, he used quotes? And teh original third-person-talkers were Bob Dole and Al Gore
A friend of mine received several hundred dollars from Japan for use of material from an online lit mag he edits.
Now that was odd.
You can photocopy from books for classes, but the deal is that you are supposed to write at the bottom where you photocopied it from.
If it’s more than a few pages and you are using it for more than one course, it is best to ask permission from the author/publisher.
John Minichillo: Yes! If your institution has access to JSTOR, EBSCO or other online databases, you can ask your students to find the stories there. It’s good for students to be aware of these resources anyway.
If you are putting together a printed packet for class (that is sold in the bookstore), most university bookstores will be pretty strict about getting permission from the original publisher for reprint rights. It’s not really a huge source of income for lit mags, but it seems fair if they’re going to sell them.
Mike,
…but there are some great anthologies out there, not just BASS, but also these two:
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (ed Tobias Wolff)
http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Contemporary-American-Short-Stories/dp/0679745130
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (ed Ben Marcus)
http://www.amazon.com/Anchor-Book-American-Short-Stories/dp/1400034825/ref=pd_sim_b_83
Vintage is more about the classics, at least in recent times, whereas Anchor is more contemporary.
I’m using the Anchor Book in a class i’m teaching now.
JAMES THAT IS INCREDIBLY VIOLENT
Regardless of your opinion of them, these are all people whose work young writers should know about. They’re important parts of literary history. If you want to throw out what they’ve done in your own work, then great. I certainly don’t think that every aforementioned writer is amazing, but that’s because I know their work and learned what I appreciated/hated about their very disparate aesthetics. I think it’s important to mix the contemporary with the vanguards of literary history.
What anthology are you using? I’m going with 3X33.
A friend of mine received several hundred dollars from Japan for use of material from an online lit mag he edits.
Now that was odd.
Mike,
…but there are some great anthologies out there, not just BASS, but also these two:
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (ed Tobias Wolff)
http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Contemporary-American-Short-Stories/dp/0679745130
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (ed Ben Marcus)
http://www.amazon.com/Anchor-Book-American-Short-Stories/dp/1400034825/ref=pd_sim_b_83
Vintage is more about the classics, at least in recent times, whereas Anchor is more contemporary.
I’m using the Anchor Book in a class i’m teaching now.
“Tlon” and “Shower of Gold” are the only two stories you’d pick out of those collections?! Man, I don’t know where to begin.
“Tlon” and “Shower of Gold” are the only two stories you’d pick out of those collections?! Man, I don’t know where to begin.