Every year, the University of Maryland Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) offers a copyright conference. I was fortunate to attend last May for the first time and though I?m still pretty mystified by concepts like fair use, orphan works and the Section 108 study group, I can now at least fake my way through a conversation about them. A lot of the conference material is available online at the symposium archives.

Some standouts from the conference were the keynote by James Boyle of Duke. Among other things, he?s one of the directors of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. There?s lots of cool stuff on that site including a must-read comic book that explores the impact of intellectual property on creativity (specifically documentary film making). Also cool was the presentation by Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University. They?ve produced a guide called Recut, Reframe, Recycle.

My take away from the conference:

1. Universities run scared when they hear intellectual property and copyright and are not asserting their fair use rights nearly enough.
2. Google may be a huge corporate monolith but because of that they?re in a pretty good position to fight the good fight when it comes to fair use; libraries and museums don?t have the guts (or resources) to do it. Google is an important and powerful ally in this fight. (NOTE: this was written before the announcement about the big Google settlement in late October 2008 . I?m still trying to sort out in my mind how fair use fits into this picture.)