Share not

Image by foko_madagascar via Flickr

I continue to be amazed by the lack of understanding regarding copyright in the academic community. It's not that our universities don't try to get our faculty learned-up. You can go to any university web site and you will find extensive resources on copyright, and fair use.

That said, I can also guarantee that with very little effort you can find many examples of copyright infringement on these sites. Universities don't have the resources to police their faculty and students, and as institutions of higher learning they have done a miserable job of teaching on this topic. That old saying comes to mind, "If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught." (Siegfried Engelmann).

So it is with interest that I read this study on the use of Creative Commons licenses and what options creators were most frequently selecting: The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses. The study found that for those allowing the creation of derivative works (82%), 71% were also requiring the share alike provision. Which means, if you want to use their stuff, you must license what you create using that identical license: derivatives allowed, and share alike. For most of us, where our institutions insist on a university owned all rights reserved license, the materials we create in the course of our work; e.g. instructional materials we are prohibited from using most of the great photos, videos, music, audio, texts, etc. that have been contributed to the commons.

Most of this great stuff: 30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media (thank you @jasonadamyoung) is off limits. When our institutions insist on restrictive, rather than permissive copyrights, we have effectively been removed from the conversation.

The future of single-source truth shops

Image via Wikipedia

If you are an online content provider this is what you're up against. You can deny it, but that's not a strategy that's going to carry you far. From David Weinberger: The temptation of stories

The new medium now can include as many stories as we want, from as many different points of view, connected by curators above the stories and by hyperlinks within the stories. The story no longer has to tell the whole truth. It’s just one of the stories. But, while that’s true of the ecosystem as a whole, the old temptation to be a single-source truth shop exists for individual online publications, whether they’re commercial or personal.

Or academic...

Note: I don't do many old-style blog posts these days since finding FriendFeed. Maybe with FriendFeed's future in doubt I should start doing these types of posts again?

Is your organization destroying your reputation?

Cover of Catch-22

I keep trying to come up with things to get people to care about copyright, and more importantly your organizations' intellectual property policies. For the most part this topic generates a lot of yawns-- I know this because they are among my least read posts. I will not be deterred. I'm making your caring my life mission.

So, when I saw this it caught my attention: A question of trust:

If you want to place factual information on the web Wikipedia should be your first port of call. Anything else is largely a waste of your time and effort. This doesn’t incidentally mean that other sources are not worthwhile or have a place, but that people need to work with the assumption that people’s first landing point will be Wikipedia.

Of course, I totally buy this. If you want to make a difference you have to go to where the people are congregating, and Wikipedia is where that is happening.

For many of our faculty this should be a concern. Our university intellectual property policies effectively prohibit us from participating. Our policies are contributing to our growing obscurity. For example, the copyright used by Wikipedia, and the all rights reserved copyright imposed by most of our institutions are incompatible. Anything that a faculty member creates, that is somehow related to their job is owned by their university. Here is the copyright from NC State University associated with my terms of employment: RUL 06.01.01

Pursuant to part 5.3.1.1. of the Copyright Regulation, all works created by these employees within the scope of their employment at North Carolina State University, which are subject to copyright, shall be “Directed Works.” The copyright to such works shall be held by North Carolina State University unless an authorized university official assigns the copyright to another party.

This intellectual property policy is a reputation killer. It is leading to greater obscurity for our faculty. It effectively prohibits faculty from contributing to the commons. It makes them a non-player in an economy where reputation is everything. That's why I found this quote in the A Question of Trust article of such interest:

I can see the ground shifting very rapidly towards a situation where a lack of engagement, a lack of interest in contributing to the publicly accessible store of knowledge, is seen as a serious negative on a CV.

I absolutely believe that this is where we are headed. That your digital footprint in the commons will be absolutely critical to your professional and economic future. It's an interesting Catch-22. Your reputation depends on your contributing, and your university IP policies prevent it. Ouch! Our copyright policies are contributing to the destruction of the reputations of many of our young faculty. There's not many things worse in life than having a job that destroys your future employment prospects.

It is time for our institutions, and especially the public institutions, to begin to participate in the commons. It can't be postponed. To do this we have to start by fixing our antiquated copyright policies. It's time for our institutions to adopt open content licenses: Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike would work. We need to turn our faculty loose. Our very future depends on it.

Faculty and commons-based peer production?

Image by Bettina Tizzy via Flickr

Most universities stake a claim to the intellectual property of their faculty by declaring that it is a work for hire:

A work made for hire is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally-recognized author of that work. According to copyright law in the United States and certain other copyright jurisdictions, if a work is "made for hire", the employer—not the employee—is considered the legal author.

In other words, the faculty member isn't the legal copyright holder, the university is.

My question, does this make it impossible for faculty to participate in commons-based peer-production? If the university holds an all-rights-reserved copyright to a faculty member's creations, and that faculty member is expected to do outreach as part of the terms of their employment (true for most faculty today), then it would stand to reason that faculty would be prohibited from contributing to an entity such as Wikipedia that uses a Creative Commons license.

I sent these questions to my university's copyright librarian for clarification. I'm anxious to see the response. The very idea of expecting faculty to engage with the public, and at the same time having copyright policies that effectively prevent them from doing so seems absurd.

I'll keep you posted on what I learn.

Social Media 101-- Open content licensing

Image via Wikipedia

Commons-based peer production is when a group of people coalesce around an object to collaboratively learn, and to add personal clarity and meaning. It is a process whereby information is transformed into knowledge^*. The term was coined by Yochai Benkler, and it is at the heart-and-soul of social networking.

In order for peer production to happen people must have the rights to modify the objects that they are gathering about. Unless you can manipulate the objects you can't have peer production. It's that simple. All-rights-reserved , the default copyright attached by most of our institutions of higher learning prohibit people from making derivative works. Unless your copyright allows for derivative works you're wasting your breath even talking about social media and peer production.

If you want to do social media you have to start by defining the rules of engagement. That's what Creative Commons licenses do. They help you to find the middle ground that enables people to participate. They give you a standard, clear, and legally defensible way to describe what people are allowed to do.

* You could argue this point based on your definition of knowledge. I'll stand-by this statement in a general sort of way. I'm talking about a process by which people take a piece of information, contextualize it and give it meaning.

Copyright: Taking the higher ground

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, I've had some discussions with people around copyright. These conversations were with academics, and the talk revolved around what they were allowed to do under the terms of their employment. It had to do with their intellectual contributions being declared as works-for-hire. Which led to a discussion of all-rights-reserved. Which lead to a discussion of joint copyright and social media licensing.

I've always tried to discuss copyright from an, it's the right thing to do perspective. This conversation on what they were allowed to do, however, seemed to resonate. These people seemed to be generally surprised that their terms of employment effectively prohibited them from participating, in a professional sense, in the conversations taking place in social media sites (e.g. Wikipedia). We also talked about how their institution's copyrights effectively prevented them from using images from Flickr, etc. that were licensed with Creative Commons share-alike provisions.

Does this level of the debate deserve further examination? I'd be happy to go there if there is an interest.

Fact checking Free

When I first came across this in Free I immediately thought, that's not right:

And, by 2002, the Linux market share of the Web server operating system market stood at about 25%, compared to Microsoft's 50 percent.

I've pretty much followed these numbers on Netcraft for years. Here's their historical chart on this market going back to November of 1995. As you can see the Web server market has been a space long dominated by the open-source Apache HTTP Server:

Microsoft's market share appeared to peak at 38% in 2007, and has been in steep decline over the last two years.

If one looks at the numbers in the Fortune 500 space you still don't see numbers approaching 50%. This July of 2000 study reported on Server Watch shows Microsoft's share at 41%.

So what's the point of all this? Got me. I just don't like to see errors propagated. Maybe there's an explanation. I'd love to know where Chris Anderson got his number. A minor point I know, in what is a very well researched and excellent book in all regards.

Our next HighTouch Bookclub read

The next read for the HighTouch bookclub will be Duke law professor James Boyle's, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. I wanted to give you the heads-up as it is more than likely that you will need to order it. Only one of our eight local Barnes and Nobles had it in stock.

I have finished reading Free, and will be posting the remainder of my chapter summary statements this weekend. (Others are welcome to post as well.) I'll be ready to start reading the new book early next week.

I do hope you'll join us.