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MIT Offering Free Copyright Course Online
IANAL writes "MIT is offering Introduction to Copyright Law as a free online course. Interested Slashdotters might find it a good way to challenge their firmly held misconceptions about copyright law as it concerns fair use, Napster, Grokster, the GPL, and P2P filesharing, among other things. There's also an article about the course over on Groklaw."
They've been offering some great math courses too. Try Strang's linear algebra. He is a genius of a teacher. And you can't copyright a matrix.
bad url perhaps...
You can tell I'm an aries because of my ram.
Here's the actual link:
Course 6.912
MIT is just getting around to this? The RIAA has been offering an "Introduction to Copyright Law" to select individuals for the past few years.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Did Microsoft acquire MIT when I wasn't looking?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
According to the course, rm is a standard unix utility whose abbreviated name stands for "Remove Malware".
In one of the lessons you're supposed to scan your p2p downloads directory for malware using rm.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Well if you had RTFA'd you notice the Creative Commons License 2.5 button on the bottom of the page. Many professors and assistants go to great lengths to get permission to post materials they use in courses (I get notices from time to time for permission to post diagrams from our FSAE team), find alternative Free sources, and strip out non-Free material. It usually works out very well since a lot of classes rely almost exclusively on the professor's own material.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
The IAP at MIT is a really neat concept. Anybody can take almost any class, and almost anybody can offer a class to teach. One that caught my eye when I worked there (never took one) was a class on 'players'. You know - those among us with the lady charm; how to be one, how to spot one, etc..
A friend of mine took a welding course during IAP, just because welding random stuff in January is definitely fun in my book.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
The course was taught by Keith Winstein, the same guy who as senior editor of The Tech interviewed Jack Valenti and showed him his DeCSS Perl script.
A number of good universities offer much of their computer science curriculum online, usually just in the form of uploading course notes, or letting the public have access to their class websites. MIT notably has the opencourseware.
Realistically all these online classes do is let you see what sort of reading you'd need to do for the actual classes. Aside from that they give you access to slides which may or may not be more enlightening than the book. I've yet to see a class that's uploaded videotaped lectures.
UW's (quite notable) computer science program has every year's class website online, and from what I've seen they generally have more material than MIT's online stuff...