Yesterday I posted that, per Unlocking IP, that iTunes U was only accepting content on the understanding that the university itself didn't have the right to re-licence. Nicholas did what I didn't though, and went to the source to find that the iTunes U licensing overview is quite a gentle friendly document instructing universities to check that their copyright is in order before distributing it and suggesting Creative Commons and GFDL as potentially appropriate licences for academic work. Nicholas also observes that universities are retaining their copyright, eg SMU.

So unless iTunes U USA and iTunes U AU are signicantly different beasts, it looks like all this is an object lesson (for me) in not citing without sighting (not trusting to a summary of anything without seeing the original documents). But good news overall, and my apologies for stupidly perpetrating confusion.

My laptop is only moderately recovered from a recent 'spillage incident', in that the arrow keys do not work very well and I need to replace the keyboard. But this cloud does have a silver lining. While the down key was completely broken, I was unable to adjust the brightness of my screen downwards (Fn+Down). During that time, my terrible (or terribly annoying) X slow crashes in which I progressively lose the mouse, the keyboard and sanity in various orders (because the main effect is the Ctrl key behaving as if it's being held down, this last time I managed to scatter the same document all over my Desktop, since Ctrl and drag is copy in Nautilus).

And now the Down key is mostly working, I can adjust my screen brightness downwards... at the cost of needing to restart X every couple of hours. So, there you go. I might even be able to file a bug, depending on what ended up in the logs.