Comments to instructors
In addition to the assignments below, most of the Class Discussion Exercises in the text on page 248 are suitable for student presentation assignments.
These topics often generate excellent presentations and a lot of discussion. The first time I taught this course (in the 1990s), I thought students would find intellectual property a very dry, boring issue. To the contrary, probably because they were or planned to be programmers, they were very interested and had strong opinions. With the development of MP3s, DVDs, and the Web, copyright controversies began to affect so much more than software, and the "dry" copyright issues became livlier still as they impact all students, not just computer scientists.
General instructions given to students
The presentations should analyze the situation and use analogies and similar cases where possible. Present the group's proposals and/or conclusions, supported by arguments.
During the presidential campaign, Shepard Fairey, a poster artist, found a photo of Barack Obama on the Internet, modified it to look more like a graphic design, and made a very popular campaign poster out of it without any credit to the photographer, Mannie Garcia, or permission from the Associated Press (for which Garcia took the photo). After Fairey declined AP's request that he pay licensing fees, AP sued Fairey for copyright violation. Fairey claims his use was a fair use. (You can see the poster and the original photo on Wikipedia and other sites on the Web.)
Group 1: Attorneys for AP, arguing that Fairey violated the copyright to the photo and should be required to pay license fees.
Group 2: Attorneys for Fairey, arguing that his use of the photo was fair use.
Group 3: A panel of judges making and explaining their decision.
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