Each librarian is affiliated with one or more academic departments, and they gave personalized tours to new faculty members from “their” departments. Displays of new materials were available for perusing by the guests, and the circulation desk was busy as the new teachers discovered the OWHL’s DVD collection. Elisabeth Tully, library director, spoke briefly about copyright issues, and each teacher was given a copy of the brochure “Know Your Copy Rights.”

Tim Sprattler, Interim Archivist, entertained the group with a presentation on “Student Life at Andover through the Ages.”

To ease their transition, the new students participated in an extensive, multi-day orientation held in the Freeman Room of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library.   The students played games, received important information, and had an opportunity to talk about their hopes and their fears in fishbowl exercises with Andover faculty.

Program “graduates” are now fully integrated members of the community.  We enjoyed having them with us during their first days at Andover, and hope that they will come back to the OWHL soon.

Resolved: that the United States Government should legalize the electronic duplication and transfer of copyrighted media for non-commercial use.

The tournament consisted of three rounds, during which teams of two debaters took the position of the Affirmative or Negative for the first two rounds, and then took the opposite position for the final round.  I like that format (called “switch-sides” because it keeps them honest.  They have to prepare both sides of the debate.)  Since I have been considering copyright issues during my sabbatical, I was very interested in how well the students would debate the complexities of the resolution.  Because coaches serve as judges, I heard all three rounds.  It was eye-opening.

The best round was the one in which the affirmative team defined the term “copyrighted media” as restricted to music.  In other words, their case supported the elimination of all copyright protection of music, with attendant file sharing over peer to peer networks.  The kids made excellent arguments regarding the extent to which the status quo is broken.  Billions of illegal free downloads are occurring each month.  There is little or no acknowledgment of music copyright, particularly among members of their age group.   One debater likened the situation to prohibition.  It seemed like a good idea, but it failed.  So alcohol was legalized, and taxed, and a lot of problems were eliminated.  (They’d like to see iTunes take over the free download business, because there is danger of viruses on many of the popular P2P sites.)

There is clear evidence that a new business model is needed–one in which users will be able to get what they want, easily and inexpensively (or freely.)  The students believe that the Google model of free service, with the revenue coming from ads, could work.  They contend that artists would not suffer;  rather, they would benefit from wider exposure to their work and would make money from concerts and merchandise.

The most interesting thing to me was the fact that the action called for in this resolution seemed so logical and obvious to all of them.  Even when the debate included other media. (They were totally clueless about the catastrophic impact on print publication of this change.)  I think that those of us who care about copyright need to support creative new business models in hopes that we influence the behavior of this group of kids who have grown up with P2P.  I doubt that anything that we do will be completely successful with this cohort, though.  Maybe what we really should be doing is planning a massive education program aimed at much younger kids.  By high school, it may be too late to change this entrenched behavior.