Archive for the ‘Intellectual Property’ Category

IPKat gives its take on the new WIPO Guide on Managing Intellectual Property For Museums.  WIPO, as you can learn more about in this report, is the UN body that coordinates international IP agreements (although much of the real action is in WTO trade negotiations).  WIPO is viewed by many as representing the interests of major western copyright-dependent industries.  Don’t miss links at the end of the IPKat post.

Open education is not addressed directly in this report, but it’s a useful primer on the challenges faced by Least Developed Countries, and issues of how to support and promote the learning as an underpinning to development run throughout this report. An example from the overview:

…the effectiveness of ODA [official development assistance] for non-agricultural technological learning and innovation has been severely compromised because donors typically do not support this activity. Although agriculture is still the major source of employment and livelihood in the LDCs, the employment transition which they are undergoing means that this position is not tenable if development partners wish to reduce poverty sustainably and substantially. There are, however, difficult issues regarding how aid should be used to support technological learning and innovation outside agriculture.

One challenge for the open education community is to understand the role OER can play in helping LDCs to improve their own educational systems. I suspect the answer will be somewhat more complicated than straightforward adoption of open content. (via Information Policy)

One of the best general backgrounders to intellectual property issues in higher education I’ve come across is Who Owns Academic Work? by Corynne McSherry. It was published in 2001, and so predates the open education movement, but it’s a great exploration of the intellectual property battles leading up to that point.

What I enjoy most about the book is the breadth of it. Rather than simply being a legal history of intellectual property, it explores the epistemic underpinnings of the concepts of the author and intellectual property. It then uses this framework to explore many of the controversies surrounding ownership of academic work, including ownership of course materials. It’s a great book for developing a deeper understanding of just why universities would choose to give educational materials away for free.

I’ve been a little hesitant to write about open education licensing issues here, because I’ve found the discussions can quickly get distracting, but I’ve come across two different blog postings that illustrate some of the issues, so it’s a good opportunity to point to them.

One post is by David Wiley, and it discusses the issue of license incompatibility. One reason for publishing under open licenses is to permit others to mix the materials with other open materials to create new open derivative works. As David points out, even if many of the licenses currently being used are almost identical in spirit, the self-perpetuating (share-alike) requirements of these licenses make it problematic to combine materials published under different licenses.

The other post, one one of my favorite blogs and one that I rarely have time to keep up with–The Patry Copyright Blog, is an interesting read given where David’s ends up. The gets back to the original inspiration for Creative Commons: The length of copyright protection is too long, and it’s a bad thing for society. If copyright restrictions were more along the lines of those suggested in the post, a great deal more material would be available for unrestricted reuse and less would require open licensing.

Not too many people are aware that Google’s Advanced Search page has a filter to allow you to search for openly licensed content that’s been tagged with the Creative Commons license code. The feature, called “Usage Rights,” is the second to last option in the first box on the Advance Search page. Here’s how Google describes the service on the related More Info page:

Our “Usage Rights” feature helps you find published content — including music, photos, movies, books, and educational materials — that you can share or modify above and beyond fair use.

If you set the search filter to “free to use or share,” you’ll get results that you can copy or redistribute. If you set the filter to “free to modify,” you’ll get results that you can use, share, or modify. (Please be sure to select “even commercially” if you want to use a work commercially.) If you leave the filter at “not filtered by license,” you’ll simply get standard, unfiltered Google results.

Please note:

The “Usage Rights” feature identifies websites whose owners have indicated that they carry a Creative Commons ( http://creativecommons.org/ ) license. By returning these search results, Google isn’t making any representation that the linked content is actually or lawfully offered under a Creative Commons license. It’s up to you to verify the terms under which the content is made available and to make your own assessment as to whether these terms are lawfully applied to the content.

This can be a really handy tool to know about, as comprehensive portals to open educational content are still developing.

Often open sharing and traditional copyright are mistakenly thought of as being somehow at odds. I’ve heard the Creative Commons folks say more than once that CC depends on strong copyright law and isn’t effective where intellectual property law is weak. D’Arcy Norman has a nice post illustrating just exactly why ownership is so important–you can’t share what you don’t own.

I’ve heard Terry Fisher of the Berkman Center speak on occasion about his proposed system for changing the way royalties are collected and distributed. His ideas always struck me as “Nice in theory, but how would they ever be implemented?” Turns out Terry has been working on that one as well. Noank Media is the new company he’s launched and probably the most intriguing of the for-profit forays into open content (the Noank system carries both open and copyrighted content). Maybe beyond the scope of a blog posting to explain the full system, but here’s the copy from their home page:

In brief, here’s how the system works: In each country, copyright owners (record companies, music publishers, film studios, etc.) authorize Noank to distribute digital copies of their works. Noank, in turn, enters into contracts with major network service providers: broadband consumer ISPs; mobile phone providers; and universities. Noank provides the service providers’ end-users with unlimited downloading, streaming, and copying licenses. In return, each access provider pays Noank a fee on behalf of each of its end-users (consumers, students, employees). 85% of the money collected from these content fees is distributed to content copyright owners. A small software program on the users’ device counts the content use. That information (automatically aggregated to protect users’ privacy) is used to determine the amount of money paid to each copyright owner.