Re: copying, learning, and teaching

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Thu, 18 Sep 1997 17:21:10 -0400

Many thanks to our colleague from Louiville (whose name I couldn't find in
the header or message) for posting excerpts from the law and some of the
legal reasoning about fair use copying for research and study.

The tests in the law I was familiar with, some of the logic of
interpretation was new to me.

I still think there is a grey area in the issue of connecting individual
use with course requirements. Just as instructors have the right to make
individual copies, so do students. That they do so on my recommendation or
for any other reason should not matter. The right to make individual copies
for study and research is not, I think, limited by the size test (though
perhaps it excludes copying a complete volume), which applies normally to
multiple copying. I would think one chapter per volume is reasonable, and
two is the limit. But there are no really definitive practices here it seems.

I hope nobody would _want_ to copy chapters from _textbooks_! The whole
point of recommending that students obtain copies of various articles and
chapters is to avoid having to use textbooks and being able to rely on
'primary' scholarship. Except in the natural sciences below the advanced
graduate level, textbooks seem to me to be uniformly inferior. They give
too single a viewpoint, they interpret complex theorists rather than
letting them speak for themselves, their discourse is too monological, and
they do not prepare students for the analytical and discipline-specific
interpretive skills they need in the field. I exempt of course 'textbooks'
that really are books of collected classic texts in a field. They perform a
great service. Otherwise textbooks in the human sciences seem to me to
thrive merely because they are convenient and easy to digest and test. In
my own undergraduate education, outside of mathematics and natural science,
I never read a single textbook.

If the xerox machine had been invented in the 1920s we might perhaps never
have had textbooks in higher education at all!

There are of course also books, like Mike Cole's excellent new _Cultural
Psychology_ that are on the borderline between treatises and textbooks. CP
is part admirably selective survey of a set of related literatures, part
original synthesis in response to a particular intellectual problem (which
it poses as well as responds to), and part summary of a body of Mike's own
research exemplifying his approach to the problem. I would not call it a
textbook, but I could imagine someone using it as a text (perhaps not the
only text) in a course in cultural psychology or research methodology.

My apologies to authors of textbooks who may be reading this. Every book
that sells is serving some audience of readers; I just wonder if they would
not be better served in other ways. Since textbooks are required by
instructors, rather than chosen by readers, there are some dilemmas in
interpreting even popularity. I am sure that many students are grateful for
textbooks as introductions to new fields, and if there were no teachers,
that would be a necessary function. Textbooks can be a great place to begin
independent study of a subject, though I find I usually need to consult at
least three to get a sense of diversity, and I proceed as quickly as
possible to identifying the germinal primary texts and reading those. Some
textbooks also perform the admirable task of reconstructing at least one
possible history of a discipline's foundations so that students can see
what came from where, when, and how. Perhaps others will disagree with me
and eagerly want to flout the law and rob the publishers by copying as much
from textbooks as they can! :)

Information wants to be free, and I would not invest my money in publishing
companies for the next century. The concept of copyright is already obsolete.

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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