Despite being an unaccomplished and underachieving scholar, I still receive a fair-share of examination copies of academic trade books and textbooks. These are books that publishers provide for free for a “trial period.” Usually, the publisher doesn’t specify the length of the trial period so they are effectively free books, if not explicitly so. However, some publishers have explicitly requested that I ship the book back to them or else I will receive a bill for the book, albeit with an “industry” discount of 20% or so.
Publishers provide these books because they hope that I will adopt them for a course and require my students to purchase them. When I worked at UCSB’s college radio station in the mid-1990s, record companies would similarly provide free CDs for the music and programming directors in hopes that they would play the recordings on-the-air and, consequently, promote sales of the recording.
It seems like a great way to promote a book or a recording, but since everyone does it, the examination/promotional copies often become clutter. My music director used to give me a bunch of CDs that he knew I would like, and I have a pile of under-examined—or entirely unexamined—books on my desk.
Examination Copies that have gone unexamined.
Done Wrong
In the academic world, the examination copies of books arrive in one of two ways:
The publisher sends a print copy. They have done so for as long as I’ve been in the game. Although it’s not as many as it used to be, some occasionally arrive by expedited couriers, such as UPS and FedEx. I always thought that to be a huge waste of resources. Haven’t book publishers heard of media mail? The post office basically invented the service just for them. Also, this is a book, not a newspaper or a timely document. There’s no way that an extra day or two will “spoil” the content.
The publisher provides an ebook.
The ebook makes a lot of sense for examination copies. It costs the publisher next to nothing to supply a bunch of interested readers the book. Moreover, it gets to the reader quicker than sending it by expedited courier. And, again, it costs a lot less.
However, most publishers are utterly terrified of unauthorized reproductions. They’re so frightened about it, in fact, that they burden the ebook with DRM that makes the book unreadable. The most common way they do this is by requiring you to use something like Adobe Digital Editions to read the book. That platform, and others like it, basically render the book and its words, into images of the book pages. In effect, you’re not reading, you’re looking at photographs of text. This makes it almost impossible for reading on small-screen devices, such a smartphone, because you can’t resize the text; you can only resize the page. No wonder phones are getting bigger and bigger.
Not only that, you can’t highlight text—only parts of the page. You can’t look up words by tapping or clicking on them because the computer doesn’t see text—it sees images. And, if you want to read somewhere without an Internet connect, such as a subway train or an airplane, you won’t because you can’t print pages or cache the entire book on your device. Bleh!
I don’t know how recording companies handle promotional copies, or whether they even provide them at all anymore. I would think that since the advent of the Internet, iTunes, and other streaming music services, they would provide radio stations with a digital file or some type. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they still shipped plastic disks via Pony Express. But let’s say for argument’s sake that, in the intervening twenty years since I worked at KCSB, the record companies started sending programming and music directors promotional MP3s. If these recording companies followed the footsteps of the book publishers, their digital offerings would be as follows:
The music director would be instructed to download a proprietary listening application specific for that recording company’s group. I suppose that’s one good thing about only three recording groups—Warner Music, Sony, and BMG—existing today. She would then download a version for each of her devices: i.e, personal computer, work computer, smartphone, and iPod-like music player (they *still* exist). The sound quality would be reduced through downsampling, resembling something like FM radio: serviceable, but certainly not optimal. The music could only be heard with a live Internet connection: go into an elevator, and you’re listening to the elevator music in the elevator. And lastly, as a final insult, the app would not allow you to change the volume.
Done Right
Earlier today, the University of California Press offered an examination copy of Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor, edited by two UCSB scholars: Michael Curtin and Kevin Samson. When I saw that I could download an ebook, I was expecting to see the book in Adobe Digital Editions or something similar crappy. Instead, I saw that I could download an EPUB, a PDF, or a MOBI file. Each of these work with different readers, such as Kindle, iBooks, and many other open source applications.
I was further pleased to see the book was not crippled by cumbersome DRM and that it was the entire book for me to examine. Thanks!
This is definitely the way to go, and even if I don’t adopt it, the book will not be abandoned on my desk. And it didn’t cost the publisher anything to send it.
As the school year winds down, some students are looking to get a jump on earning some credits over the coming summer.
I will be teaching an online version of Media Technologies at CUNY Queens College this summer. For four weeks in July, between July 5 and July 28. Much like the winter session course I taught in January, this course will be asynchronous and entirely online.
Media Technologies surveys twelve communication technologies. Rather than schedule lectures at a specific time that students watch online, I am emphasizing asynchronous, self-directed study.
For each media technology, students will…
audition a short introductory lecture that explains the topic and emphasizes impacts of that technology on the society that adopted it,
The winter course was a success, and using prerecorded video lectures has worked well in the spring sections. All the students completed the class: that doesn’t happen in the face-to-face courses where absenteeism is a problem. For the spring semester, I used the prerecorded online lectures to “flip” the classroom, and students have been very receptive and complimentary about the recorded slideshow presentations. For these reasons, I’m largely reproducing what worked in the winter session and spring semester for the summer course.
Finally, if you’re taking this course, you can get cash back on your textbooks. Shop through Ebates and buy your books from QC’s Textbookx.com store to get cash back on your textbook purchases. Not a member of Ebates? Sign up and get a $10 cash bonus.
The middle of March is upon us, and all around the New York area, many college students and faculty are preparing for Spring Break. The break is always welcomed because it “breaks” up the extended slog of the spring term, which usually lasts for four full months.
This semester, I’m teaching at two colleges: at Pratt Institute and at CUNY Queens College. For my film history class at Pratt, I was able to schedule the midterm exam today, on March 11, just before spring break starts on March 14. However, I couldn’t do the same for the students in my media technologies class at Queens College. Their midterm exam will take place on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), but their spring break doesn’t take place until April 28. That is a very late spring break, taking place between the twelfth and thirteenth weeks of class.
Here’s a comparison of spring 2016 semesters at four area colleges where I have worked (Pratt, CUNY, and Fordham) or studied (NYU).
Week
NYU
Pratt
CUNY
Fordham
Jan 18
Week 1
Week 1
Jan 25
Week 1
Week 2
Week 2
Feb 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 1
Week 3
Feb 8
Week 3
Week 4
Week 2
Week 4
Feb 15
Week 4
Week 5
Week 3
Week 5
Feb 22
Week 5
Week 6
Week 4
Week 6
Feb 29
Week 6
Week 7
Week 5
Midterm Exam
Mar 7
Midterm Exam
Midterm Exam
Week 6
Week 8
Mar 14
Spring Break
Spring Break
Midterm Exam
Week 9
Mar 21
Week 8
Week 9
Week 8
Spring Break
Mar 28
Week 9
Week 10
Week 9
Easter Break
Apr 4
Week 10
Week 11
Week 10
Week 10
Apr 11
Week 11
Week 12
Week 11
Week 11
Apr 18
Week 12
Week 13
Week 12
Week 12
Apr 25
Week 13
Week 14
Spring Break
Week 13
May 2
Week 14
Studio Days
Week 13
Week 14
May 9
Reading Day
Final Exam
Week 14
Final Exam
May 16
Final Exam
?
May 23
Final Exam
NYU and Pratt both schedule their spring breaks in the middle of March, just after Week 7 at NYU and Week 8 at Pratt. That’s ideal because you can schedule a Midterm Exam the week before and have it wrap up the first half of the course. Fordham schedules their spring break a week later but, because it’s a Jesuit university, it adds an additional Easter Break. For some reason, Fordham dictates that faculty schedule their Midterm Exams in late February. Whereas courses at NYU and at Pratt are divided into halves, the semester at Fordham is broken up into (unequal) thirds: before the midterm, between the midterm and breaks, and after the breaks.
The CUNY schedule, on the other hand, is a mess. As I’ve complained in the past, CUNY should stop scheduling spring break around the spring Easter/Passover holidays because it’s not conducive to learning. My students will endure twelve consecutive weeks of class before they get a break. Once the break is over and they will have emptied their minds of everything I taught them, they will have only two weeks to recover that knowledge before heading into the final exam. Moreover, the students in my class will also bear an additional burden: our final exam is scheduled for two weeks after our last class, despite Finals Week starting on the week of May 16.
My own undergraduate experience was quite different from that of these students. My university was on the quarter system, and spring break was the week between the winter and spring quarters. Once we finished our winter-quarter, final exams in late-March, we were off until classes started again in early April.
One of the best yet under-advertised features of being an NYU student–or a member of its faculty and staff—is the free admission to New York City–area museums. Some of the highlights include the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the New York Historical Society.
Last week, Pratt Institute announced that its students, faculty, and staff can enjoy free admission to the following museums:
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, plus one guest
Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
The Frick Collection
Guggenheim, up to 3 guests
Museum of Arts and Design
MoMA, students-only as of January 2019
New Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art, plus one guest
Admission is also extended to alumni at the following museums:
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Brooklyn Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art
As the weather gradually begins to warm, it’s really tempting to visit a few museums before cycling and softball occupy my free time come spring.
Earlier this week, I submitted the grades for my first online, winter-session class. As I wrote earlier on this site, this was my first experience with a fully online course, either as a student or as a teacher. Aside from speaking with a couple of students who have taken online classes and colleague who has taught a language class over the Internet, I developed this course in a vacuum. This was both liberating and challenging. I felt free to use whatever tools I wanted, but I was also plagued with the uncertainty of whether I was doing things The Right Way, or what technologists refer to as “best practices.”
Since I have taught this class face-to-face for several semesters, I adopted the course into twelve media technologies. Each media technology constitutes a learning unit. The structure is basically as follows:
Manual to Mechanical Media
Writing
Early Print
Mass Print
Photography
Electromechanical Media
Telegraph
Telephone
Motion Pictures
Sound Recording
Electromagnetic and Digital Media
Radio
Television
Computers
Internet
My colleague, who I’ll refer to as Claudine, suggested that I divide the class into a series learning units, each consisting of objectives, assignments, and assessments. I took her advice and, for each media technology, I assigned students to…
read a chapter from Irving Fang’s textbook Alphabet to Internet and a condensed version of an article from the fifth edition of the anthology Communication in History,
After studying four media technologies, I assigned students a midterm exam consisting of essays.
The course was mostly asynchronous. Because the course was online, I wanted to provide students with some flexibility. Nothing about the course was live. They did not have to “tune in” to a lecture. Everything was designed to be completed at his or her own pace. However, because the winter session schedule was so compressed and had to “squeeze in” an entire semester’s work in three weeks, I did require students to complete four learning units per week to keep apace.
Here’s how I set up each learning unit of the course:
Today marks two firsts in my teaching: teaching an entirely online course and teaching during the three-week winter session. It’s also novel because I never took a course under either of these conditions as a student.
To better serve its diverse population of non-traditional students, the department of Media Studies at CUNY Queens College has been looking to offer more non-traditional course offerings. Those include more online and hybrid courses and more courses during the three-week winter session. (The department is also offering more courses during the summer sessions.)
My offering during this non-traditional period, Media Technologies, surveys twelve communication technologies. Rather than schedule lectures at a specific time that students watch, I am emphasizing asynchronous, self-directed study.
For each media technology, students will…
audition a short introductory lecture that explains the topic and emphasizes impacts of that technology on the society that adopted it,
Finally, based on feedback I received from students enrolled in other online classes, I am dispensing with any collaborative requirement. The students I surveyed expresses disappointment and frustration with instructors requiring students to post to blogs, to social networking sites, or an online forum. They indicated that not only was it the most annoying part of the class, but also the least impactful.
The course is currently full. Enrollment is capped at twenty students to allow for personal contact with students registered for the course. This is especially important because we’re not aiming to create a MOOC at the expense of nurturing our undergraduates.
The above links to Amazon are an affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
DMCA Exemptions for Circumventing Copyright Protections on Motion Pictures, 2015 edition
Since 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) has prohibited the use of technologies that circumvent copyright protections. The letter of the law prohibits the use of DVD ripping software, jailbreaking your smartphone or smart TV, or modifying the diagnostic software of your automobile. Every three years, however, the US Librarian of Congress considers various exemptions to these provisions, and on Wednesday, the Library of Congress ruled on those exemptions, which took effect the same day.
As a film and television scholar, I am most interested in the provisions governing the circumvention of copyright protections on motion pictures on digital video media. Students and teachers in film studies courses need to study short clips and even individual frames. Making these excerpts and stills from a copyright-protected DVD offers the best solution in terms of efficiency and fidelity. Since at least 2006, the Librarian of Congress has exempted college and university faculty teaching film-studies courses from the technological protection measures on motion picture video works to make those short clips and frame grabs.
Each triennial review considers new technologies and new, non-infringing uses for exempting certain parties from the prohibition on copyright protections. When I first learned of these exemptions in 2006, extracting digital video clips only applied to DVDs. Since then, however, new digital video technologies have emerged, including Blu-ray disks and streaming video protocols, and those have surpassed the image resolution and availability of standard-definition DVDs. Moreover, groups beyond film-studies faculty, such as community librarians and documentary filmmakers, have made compelling cases for circumventing the copyright protections on digital video formats and petitioned the Librarian of Congress for similar exemptions.
The Librarian of Congress divided the petitioning parties seeking exemption into seven classes:
college and university faculty and students, for purposes of criticism and comment
kindergarten through twelfth-grade educators and students, for educational purposes
students and faculty participating in massive online open courses (“MOOCs”), for purposes of criticism and comment
educators and learners in libraries, museums and nonprofit organizations to circumvent access controls, for educational purposes
authors of multimedia e-books
filmmakers
videos made for noncommercial purposes
The Ruling on Motion Pictures, 2015–2018
Wednesday’s ruling extends the exemption for several methods and instances. The Librarian of Congress outlined two methods for recording short excerpts from a copy-protected medium:
using screen capture technology
using software to circumvent the copyright protection from a DVD, a Blu-Ray, or digital transmission (a “stream”) where screen capturing will not produce the “required level of high-quality content.”
In all cases, the video being extracted must be “lawfully made and acquired” for the purpose of criticism or comment. This excludes unauthorized (“bootleg”) videos and also videos that were imported from an licensed market to a market where no licensing exists. Again, the exemption only applies to “short portions” of a motion picture for the purpose of “criticism or comment.”
Summary
From reading the ruling, these are the instances where the Librarian of Congress has granted an exemption to the prohibition for circumventing copyright protection on motion pictures. Although I’m not a lawyer and can’t defend you in an infringement suit, I am reasonably smart and understand the ruling to allow circumvention of copyright protection in the following cases.
Can I circumvent copyright protections on a legally made and legally acquired motion picture to extract a short portion for the purpose of comment and criticism for use in…
This includes a commercial entity, such as a video production house, paid by a non-commercial organization.
a nonfiction multimedia e-book offering film analysis?
Yes
Yes
This is a very specific kind of e-book.
by college and university faculty and students, for educational purposes?
Yes
Yes, for film studies courses
That’s me!
by faculty of massive open online courses (MOOCs) for educational purposes?
Yes
Yes, for film studies courses
MOOC must be administered by an accredited institution and must do their due-diligence to prevent infringement.
by kindergarten through twelfth-grade educators for educational purposes?
Yes
Yes, but only for film studies courses
Screen capture only for other, non–film studies courses.
by educators and participants in nonprofit digital and media literacy programs offered by libraries, museums and other nonprofit entities with an educational mission?
Yes
No
Screen capture only.
These exemptions took effect on October 28, 2015, and will remain in effect until they are replaced after the next triennial review.
Screen capture technology must “appear to be available to the public” and only used to “reproduce a motion picture that has been lawfully acquired and decrypted.” This permits someone to use screen-capture software to grab the content from something that you legally acquired and can legally play. ↩
The ruling specifically mentions two copyright protection methods that can be legally circumvented: CSS for DVD, and AACS for Blu-ray. The ruling also vaguely mentions whatever “technological measure” is used to protect a “digital transmission,” presumably because there is no standard method for protecting different digital video streams. All of these fall under the technological circumvention. ↩
For most taxpayers in the United States, “Tax Day,” the deadline for filing income tax returns for calendar-year filers, is on April 15. It’s a day that, upon reaching adulthood, every working American observes closely as a holiday or a tragic anniversary (September 11 or December 7, for instance). But in a post-Fordist America, where not everyone earns a living from a single full-time job, the deadline is six months later.
For filers who earn all of their income from a single full-time job, filing taxes is pretty simple. It gets a little more complicated if you own a house or have a lot of medical expenses, but for most of these people, you rush to file your taxes because you’ll receive a refund. The sooner you receive your money, the sooner you can buy that new TV or start on that addition to the house. In such cases, April 15 is the due date not the do date for filing an income tax return.
But not everyone has a single source of income. For instance, I cobble together a living from various teaching jobs at multiple colleges. Each one issues a Form W-2. In addition, I occasionally do other work, such as help a small company set up a secure file sharing system or edit videos for an art gallery. Each of those gigs yields a Form 1099-MISC. Also, in the last few years, I’ve offered my improving screen printing skills to a few places in need of custom-printed t-shirts. Each of those also results in another 1099.
All of the sources of income make for a complex tax return. Freelancers with multiple clients are no strangers to having a pile of tax forms showing income. In order to minimize one’s tax burden, it’s smart to record and to report business expenses as much as possible. This takes a lot of time, and for those of us who are overly meticulous or are terminal procrastinators, we file a request for a six-month extension.
Consequently, “Tax Day” for post-Fordist workers is really October 15. An extension to file your taxes is not an extension to pay your taxes. You still have to pay any amount due before April 15. But getting an additional six months to figure out what you actually owe is sometimes necessary. Write a big check in April, file later, and get a tiny refund at the end of it all.
I’m ashamed to admit that I did that this year. I didn’t file my 2014 tax returns until yesterday, October 15, 2015, two and a half months before the start of 2016. And like a lot of people I know with multiple sources of income, I know that I wasn’t alone.
Initially intended to help faculty at Beloit College in Wisconsin avoid “dated references” and to be aware of mindset of an incoming first-year undergraduate, the list has become an annual ritual both signaling the dawn of the academic year and to have someone remind you how youngsters presumably think. Almost immediately, the list garnered attention in the press and became fodder for your friends and colleagues to forward via email, years before things “went viral” as they do today.
I was largely unimpressed by this year’s list. Some of the items here are not what I would consider exclusive to the young. For example, the list reminds us that for an eighteen year-old, “Google has always been there” and that “Wi-Fi [is] an entitlement.” I’m old enough to remember the early days of the web when we browsed through directories—not search engines—and connected to computers using Ethernet (if we were lucky) and telephone modems (if we were home), but today, I can’t imagine life without search or spending a significant amount of time somewhere without broadband, even when airborne.
One reference did ring very true. Apparently, for these kids today, “Heaven’s Gate has always been more a trip to Comet Hale-Bopp and less a film flop.” However, that’s been true for a while. Whenever I’ve mentioned Michael Cimino’s maligned epic film, I always note that I am not referring to the California cult, which happen to have the same name. That’s been true both when teaching undergraduate classes and chit-chatting at a cocktail party. Most people really don’t remember that film.
No one here is going to a comet. (Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino, 1980, Kobal Collection)
But most of the remaining items appeared to only make a reader feel old as opposed to actually describe how an eighteen year-old American student would think. For example, would an incoming undergraduate student care that the “airport in Washington, D.C., has always been Reagan National Airport?” Who on earth is Ronald Reagan? Or that “CNN has always been available en español?” Do kids today even have cable? Or that “Ellis Island has always been primarily in New Jersey?” My guess is that it’s not that many American, regardless of age, are even aware that most European immigrants entered the US through the Garden State.
These immigrants held at Ellis Island are actually in New Jersey. (AP Photo)
However, the list always contains some interesting facts that even aging faculty (and your aging social peers) would find novel. For example, have we really been mass producing hybrid automobiles in the US that long? They seem newer than that. Do surgeons really use “super glue” in the operating room? And who knew that Amoco gas stations were even around as late as 1998?
Finally, I found one very notable item that reflects a deep social change, even more so than the ubiquity of Wi-Fi or the length of the Lion King’s run on Broadway. The list notes that “‘no means no’ has always been morphing, slowly, into ‘only yes means yes.'”. It’s a mindset that kids and old-timers should all share.
With only three weeks before the start of the fall semester, Final Draft is offering an eighteen-week trial for students at eligible educational institutions. Eighteen weeks should be enough for a semester. After that, students can purchase the software for $129—a discount of $120 off the standard pricing—and then regular upgrades for $99.
