Students petition USC film-school for the right to use Creative Commons:

Cory Doctorow:
The School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California has been under fire all year from film student who are frustrated at having to assign copyright in all their works to the school. That means that student filmmakers can't even put their stuff online to help them get work when they graduate, or even get feedback from off-campus film-lovers.

My student Cameron Parkins (I've just finished a year of teaching at USC on a Fulbright Chair) has written an excellent essay for my class critiquing the film school's policy and proposing an alternative: students should be free to choose to license their works for redistribution under Creative Commons.

Cameron makes an excellent argument for this case, and has followed it up with an online petition to the film-school to overturn this bad policy.

USC SCA stands at an impasse. Conflicting approaches to copyright present various
options for SCA as it reevaluates is IP policy, and it would do well to adopt (and
encourage) CC-licensed IP option for its students. SCA’s most glaring fault is in its
discordance with the IP policies of other, similar, film programs through out the U.S.,
especially those in Los Angeles who face the same industrial constraints (LMU, UCLA,
CalArts).

SCA’s goals should be to foster creativity and openness. Its IP policy should reflect this
by being inline with the sprit of artistic creation and the spirit of academic inquiry. Its
current policy represents neither of these, but rather a corporate, non-academic approach
to content ownership. This must be remedied if SCA wishes to remain a leader in its field
and continue to offer its students a cutting-edge education – both technologically and
ideologically.

Link to petition,
Link to white-paper