Introduction to Copyright Law
A grounding in copyright law taught through MIT OpenCourseWare, covering how federal law is structured, basic legal research skills, legal citation, and use of LexisNexis. The course works through the 1976 Copyright Act and applies it to music, computers, broadcasting, and education, then moves into fair use and the file-sharing fights over Napster and Grokster. Later sessions cover the Library Access to Music Project, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DVD encryption, software licensing, and the GNU General Public License and free software movement. Materials include the syllabus, readings, and assignments MIT used in the actual class, giving a working sense of how copyright doctrine collided with digital technology in the late 1990s and early 2000s. No certificate is offered, but the full set of course materials is free to use.