Harvard Law School
CopyrightX is a twelve-week networked distance-learning course, offered under the auspices of the EdX initiative. The course explores the current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed. Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures (by Prof. Fisher), live webcasts, and weekly online seminars (led by Harvard Law School teaching fellows), participants in the course examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression.
Admission to the course is free and is open to anyone over the age of 13, but enrollment is limited. The 2013 version of the course is now complete. (Some press coverage of the 2013 version is available here.) The next version of the course will start in January of 2014. If you might be interested in participating, please send an email message to copyrightx@cyber.law.harvard.edu; we'll notify you when the applications are being accepted.
The materials used in the 2013 version of the course can be obtained by following these links:
All of these materials are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5 License, the terms of which are available here.
The materials are modular; feel free to watch or use them in any combination and in any order. However, you might find it useful to peruse the materials in the sequence in which they were presented in the 2013 CopyrightX course itself. Half of the course participants pursued a "Case-law Curriculum"; the other half pursued a "Global Curriculum." As their names suggest, the former emphasized judicial opinions, primarily from the United States, while the latter emphasized copyright law in jurisdictions other than the United States.
These materials could be used to construct a self-study distance-learning course. Alternatively, they could be used by a group of people interested in studying copyright together. Ideally, such a "satellite" course would be led by someone who is already reasonably familiar with copyright law, but this level of expertise is not essential. The members of such a satellite group would watch the lectures and do the readings – and then meet in some way to discuss the issues and problems raised by those materials. Several free online discussion tools, including Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, could be used for this purpose. If you are interested in creating or signing up for such a satellite, please visit the CopyrightX Self-Organizing Center. Finally, if you create a satellite, we ask that you contact us, both at the start and at the conclusion of your venture, to let us know how it worked. Such information would help us in designing future online courses.
--The CopyrightX Team
Version 3.0
Last modified: May 18, 2013