Tag Archive for 'copyright'

Fraud is in the air

Published
by
Terri Bays
on August 21, 2009
in copyright, intellectual property, online, open and opencourseware
. 1 Comment

As both the hiring and the fall teaching cycles get underway, we’re seeing a rash of articles in the Chronicle about various forms of Academic fraud. Today’s “Strange Tales From the Trenches” by Daniel J. Ennis and Arne R. Flaten (http://bit.ly/8ms1F) follows, for example, last Saturday’s “Should You Discuss Your Work in Progress?” (http://bit.ly/fEUk5) by Gina Barreca. The latter provoked a stream of comments by academics concerned about their research ideas being stolen, and I felt compelled to add a remark about not letting our concern to protect our ideas prevent us from engaging in the types of collaboration that brought so many of us into academics in the first place.

There’s more to be said than simply urging folks not to lose their sense of sharing, however. Those who have published their ideas in OCW know that OCW publication can be a way to stake their claims to ideas or techniques long before they are ready to publish research articles. The digital versions are date-stamped by the hosting server, so, should they actually need to take a case to court, they have tangible evidence of their prior claims. This is where it’s important to remember that OCW publication does not mean relinquishing either copyright or the right to attribution.

Granted, this isn’t enough to prevent someone from pursuing your line of research and drawing more insightful conclusions than yours (ideas cannot be copyrighted). This (as both Barreca and several commentators pointed out) is part and parcel of academic life. It will, however, give you recourse in cases like those described by Ennis and Flaten, where work either simply is used without permission or citation or more egregiously is misrepresented as someone else’s creation. Having your work visible and labeled as your own allows the vigilant to find evidence of fraud when they go looking rather than harbor vague suspicions they have no way of substantiating.

On the brighter side, sharing your nascent ideas with students, with colleagues and with the wider learning community opens you to further opportunities for academic growth. Those potential thieves are also your potential cheerleaders, muses and collaborators. Keeping your ideas to yourself might keep you safe, but it will also keep you isolated.

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.