Berkeley's J-school will have students creating an intellectual property weblog in the fall. There's some interesting stuff to be considered here, like websites that want to prevent linking to anything but their homepage [deep linking], copyright, or even libel.

Anyways, I can't see that journalists, even with a cursory introduction to intellectual property, will really get it right. Collecting mainstream media news stories on IP issues isn't going to cut the mustard. Yes, journalists are (for the most part) concerned with their first amendment rights. But are they really concerned with anyone else's? It's in a journalist's best (financial) interest to aim their stories at middle-class Americans, who, for the most part, don't really care about intellectual property issues. Most people have more pressing issues to worry about, like mortgages and kids.

I guess I am afraid (especially since the students in this class are assigned 750 word stories) that they will rely on other journalists' work, instead of actual source materials. Are they really going to want to read 60 page opinions for 750 words? I doubt it.

The professors are obviously trying to teach the little J-bunnies something here, and insofar as journalism is an academic discipline, it should be studied, but I don't think the way they are structuring the course is the best way. It needs to be more integrated with other studies of hypertextualism. Start with the king (that would be Vannevar), throw in some Walter Ong and George Landow, and Derrida for good measure and go from there. Discuss media convergence, application to academic thought, especially legal thought. In the legal world, it's better that you are unoriginal in terms of any one particular thought (not that the sum of your thoughts should be unoriginal!) than not. Cite, cite, cite (and bluebook). Hell, consider Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw. They reference the citations for you. That's some serious linkage there. Or scholarly electronic communities like CogNet or any number of journal pre-print and e-print repositories that advance scholarly communication and research to much greater speeds. Start thinking about how this affects democracy, political values, citizenship.

The real problem I have here is that the course is centered around the study of weblogs primarily through news sources. It's not the way to approach an academic discipline. Would you write your thesis from stories you gathered through a reuters newsfeed? In the end, I might have to accept this is a journalism class, not one on comparative media studies (the bastard child of J-school and literature departments?).