Archive for the 'intellectual property' Category

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 0 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.

A Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Courseware

Published
by
Garin Fons
on January 27, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, education, hewlett, intellectual property, news, ocw and open educational resources
. 0 Comments

Corona of the Sun during a Solar Eclipse (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright)Â (from flickr commons: http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2534500722/)

A Note from the Fair Use on Open CourseWare team:

All of us have been frustrated by problems with third-party rights for open courseware materials. We know that if we could clarify when fair use applies, we could vastly expand the utility of what we do. And we know that in other cases, creative communities have done that. For instance, documentary filmmakers now find that insurers accept their claims of fair use, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. Similarly, media literacy teachers now can teach without fear, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. These codes of best practices were coordinated by Profs. Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide, through the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

We need a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware. A group of representatives at some of the open courseware universities—MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Creative Commons—have started a project to do this, in coordination with Jaszi and Aufderheide, and with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation and from each of our universities. Each of the eight participating universities’ staff has set aside some part of their workload for this job.

Are you interested in helping to shape a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware? You can participate at several levels. If you would like to become a researcher on the project, just let Lindsey Weeramuni (lweera@mit.edu), the project’s coordinator know. Do you have a story to tell? Write Jaszi and Aufderheide at socialmedia@american.edu and we’ll connect you. Do you think your organization would eventually like to become a signatory? Let Lindsey know and we’ll be in touch when the document has been crafted, for your participation.

We hope to complete this work by September 1, so that the 2009-2010 school year can be a great one for open courseware.

Other questions or comments can also be directed here at open.michigan@umich.edu

Not Again!

Published
by
Terri Bays
on September 15, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, education, intellectual property, licensing, mit, ocw, open, opencourseware, press coverage, remix, reuse and sharealike
. 0 Comments

Very nice article by Noam Cohen in Sunday’s NYT about Connexions, an OCWC affiliate member and leader in the open textbook movement. Cohen starts with an account of R. Preston McAfee’s decision to allow free downloads of his economics textbook (or low-cost print-on-demand from Lulu and Flat World Knowledge) rather than with a traditional publishing house. McAfee is protesting both the high price of traditionally-published textbooks and their market-driven content.

The article then justly commends Connexions for its “broader effort” to allow users to “rip burn and mash” course material. I am cheering right along until Cohen uses the remix issue to contrast Connexions’ work with “other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T.“ Okay, so he’s not talking about most of us, and now we’re going to hear about the evils of .pdf, right? No. . . Cohen tells us that the big difference is that “Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited.”

Huh?

It’s admittedly a tough thing to explain in short space. And it’s even a tougher thing to make interesting to the average reader.

But this article gets it wrong, and I’m compelled to set the record straight once again.

What we have here is a mash up of concerns. Connexions does use the Creative Commons Attribution license, which is broader than than that used by MIT and many other OCW’s, on account of its not requiring either a non-commercial use or license compatibility. The Share-Alike clause is the point of concern, because can complicate the mixing of materials originally published under incompatible licenses (and here the non-commercial clause can come into play as well). But complication is not the same as prohibition, and we would do well not to let our internal disagreements over optimal licensing blur that fact, especially when we are addressing our potential users.

The fact is that OpenCourseWare projects, including those under the CC share-alike license, have had a lot of success on the reuse and redistribution front, as attested to the hundreds of courses that have been localized and translated around the world.

I do not want to downplay the legitimate concern that undue complication of the remix process might prevent its happening at all. We should and do engage in lively debate about what licenses will strike the right balance between the desires of producers and the convenience of users.

But it’s important to be clear on the essentials. The average reader of the NYT article surely walked away with an erroneous impression of what we do here. And to the extent that reader was a potential OCW adoptee, everybody loses.

Virginia Announces Physics ‘Flexbook’ Solicitation

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 11, 2008
in intellectual property and opencourseware
. 0 Comments

Possibly of interest to some of our members — the State of Virginia has issued a Request for Collaboration on a “Flexbook”:

Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra and Secretary of Education Tom Morris today announced the release of a Request for Collaboration (RFC) to career and technical centers, school divisions, and institutions of higher education calling for assistance in the development and publication of an open source physics “Flexbook” for Virginia.

The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open–source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content. The Commonwealth is partnering with CK–12 (www.ck12.org) on this initiative as they will provide the free, open–source technology platform to facilitate the publication of the newly developed content as a “Flexbook” — defined simply as an adaptive, web–based set of instructional materials.

“Better preparing students for post–secondary education and the workforce is one of Governor Kaine’s goals with particular emphasis on STEM education,” Secretary Morris said. “This public–private partnership will demonstrate the potential of web–based collaboration to create modern–day physics content that will be available at no cost,” added Secretary Chopra.

h/t Jim Groom.

Re.creat.ion

Published
by
Laura Dewis
on March 18, 2008
in creative commons, education, intellectual property, ocw, oer, open educational resources, remix, resources, reuse, sharealike and teaching
. 0 Comments

So this week I have been mostly ranting about creativity (or lack of). I’ve been inspired by a few things recently such as the We are what we do approach to friendly, guilt-inducing, but essentially practical advice marketing around environmental awareness - their key message is small actions, lots of people, big change. Then there was the Metro ReCreate competition encouraging people to create something new from their newspaper. Here are some people randomly collaborating to create a house from newspapers.
Newspaper house

It constantly strikes me how fun, simple and beautiful these things are. They appeal to people’s creativity. They join people in a creative mission. They create something tangible (actions in the case of We Are What We Do.) They promote the creations in a way that encourages more contributions (today the top of their homepage declares 1,247,119 actions completed). And they badge their contributors as responsible citizens (wear that organic cotton shopper with pride).

So what is the relevance for Open Educational Resources? Those in the OCWC (and many others) are working hard to publish educational resources freely and openly under a Creative Commons license. Made available as building blocks for new courses, people can amend the resources to create new, possibly richer versions with wider relevance to a global audience - essentially recreating rather than reinventing course materials. There are examples of remixed versions of Open University materials in the LabSpace. In accordance with the 1% rule only a tiny proportion of OER users are being creative in this way. But you can bet your bottom dollar that its not 1% of the global academic community who are making contributions in this way. There are many, many reasons why - which is another day, another blog post. But if one reason is time we should consider that the “small changes x lots of people = big change” message works. We have to enable our contributors to make those changes quickly and easily. Another barrier is awareness of open educational resources.

So how do we communicate the principles in a fun, simple and beautiful way?

We have some ideas for why remixing educational resources are useful, and why open licensing is important for inspiring creativity, but until/unless remixing becomes commonplace we won’t be able to test our assumptions (that sharing resources might reduce costs of course development, increase the time tutors spend interacting with students and increase quality of materials for example). More importantly we won’t be able to find out from users what is the real value to them of having these materials. It sounds obvious, but until you understand the benefits, it’s impossible to communicate them.

So we need to coax the 1% of creative remixers in the educational community to make use of these materials. Taking lessons from We Are What We Do and ReCreate we need to induce guilt (do not waste these intellectual resources), inspire creativity and creation (take our blocks and build), reward and badge our contributors as responsible resource creators (an I’m in the 1% t-shirt?) and give them a creative mission to join (academia is by nature serious and complicated but we all have a fun and simple side we like to indulge. Even pitch the resource creators in a battle with the resource haters).

Creative suggestions on the blog’s equivalent of the back of a postcard - be in the 1% and comment below. I might even get you a t-shirt.

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on May 23, 2007
in copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, ocw, oer and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

One of the biggest challenges/opportunities of OER/OCW is that of “Fair Use” — which involves both:

  • Educating people about what types of creative content can be used for “criticism, news, educational, reporting, teaching and parody” (and how), and
  • Educating them about what CAN’T or SHOULDN’T be done

    • Here’s a video that attempts to illustrate these issues in a creative way. Pay special attention to the FBI warning at the beginning.