You missed the boat on the issue raised in “Internet Raises Sticky Questions About Ownership of IP in Academia.” Faculty claims to IP are only a stalking horse for the real issue: How to protect faculty jobs, once broad band brings in full and complete, very low cost, distance learning. You can understand this issue only in the context of considering what would happen to higher education once, for example, AOL offers the entire curriculum of Harvard for a subscription fee of $20 a month. Do the math: One million subscribers would yield a revenue stream of $20 million a month or $250 million a year. Several business plans have projected the total cost of producing the content at less than $25 million a year. Higher education classroom teaching is the most inefficient segment of white collar work left in America. That is surely bound to change in the next ten years and faculty members recognize such and are doing what they can to preserve the status quo.
Second, your piece wholly failed to look at the issue through the eyes of the consumer, the student who is better off having good notes from which to study. Education is not a game. The object is for the student to learn.
