Professors Claiming Copyright Over Their Lectures

from the educational-IP dept

It's always struck me that the strongest supporters of copyright law run into a lot of problems when it comes to educational institutions. After all, the whole purpose of an educational institution is to share knowledge and information as much as possible and continue to impart those ideas to others. But, it appears that copyright maximalism is seeping into the classrooms as well. In the last couple of years, we've seen a lawsuit over a note taking service -- claiming lectures are covered by copyright -- and a professor demanding that students destroy all their notes at the end of the year since the professor claims he holds the copyright.

Michael Scott points us to a similar story, involving a Harvard grad who is running a non-profit notetaking service. While there's no lawsuit or anything yet, there is a discussion on whether or not the professors' lectures are covered by copyright, with Harvard's General Counsel insisting that yes they are:

"under the federal Copyright Act of 1976, a lecture is automatically copyrighted as long as the professor prepared some tangible expression of the content--notes, an outline, a script, a video or audio recording."

In response, however, the copyright experts over at Copycense destroy that claim and lay down some knowledge (free of charge) for Harvard's AG:

Under the current Copyright Act, a work qualifies for protection only once it is original and then fixed in a way that people can perceive it (i.e. the "tangible medium of expression"). This is essentially what Section 102(a) says in basic terms.

The information from Harvard's counsel is incorrect because a lecture generally would not qualify for the "fixed" part of the equation. What Harvard seems to conflate is eligibility for copyright protection under Section 102(a) and the public performance right under Section 106(4).

But a professor can't have a public performance right under 106(4) if the work in question does not even qualify for copyright protection in the first place under Section 102(a). And a lecture, in and of itself, does not qualify as a protected work under the '76 Act because it is not fixed. (There also may be an argument against copyrightability based on originality grounds, but the lack of fixation is certain and terminal.)

The only way we can determine that a professor's lecture would qualify for copyright protection, assuming it was original, in the first place is if the lecture was recorded. Then there would be two copyrighted works: the lecture, and then the notes or slides. The professor's notes or slides arguably would qualify for copyright protection, but copyrightability in the notes is a separate issue from copyrightability in the lecture.

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Times Must Be Tough: Harvard Becoming A Trademark Troll

from the ask-not-what-you-can-do-for-hah-vahd dept

Vanity Fair recently had a long, but absolutely fascinating article on how Harvard gambled away a big part of its endowment. Even worse, folks at Harvard seemed to think that the annual increases to the endowment were a sure thing, and spent like they were always going to see massive returns. The university is now feeling a pretty massive pinch because of this, and trying all sorts of things to cut costs and bring in more revenue. Apparently, that includes trademark trolling. ChurchHatesTucker points us to the news that Harvard is looking to trademark a bunch of common or well-known phrases, including "Ask what you can do," (based on President Kennedy's famous speech) and "Lessons learned." Not surprisingly, this is raising some free speech questions, concerning the university's right to try to claim some form of "ownership" over these common phrases. The university claims it's just for defensive purposes:

"Since we're spending so much time and money to promote this phrase, we just want to make sure someone doesn't say we can't use it."

Of course, that basically highlights the ridiculousness of the way copyright, patents and trademarks are viewed these days: as something you need to "stockpile" so someone else doesn't get them. Some of the trademark applications are on phrases that Harvard isn't even using:

"You need to reserve something in case you intend to use it," Calixto said. "We're strategically protecting it for use at some point down the line."

And I thought you could only get trademarks on actual use in commerce.

In the meantime, when I started reading the articles linked above, and thought that it would make for a good post, I totally planned to end it by pointing out that people should start getting around these trademarks by referring to the university as "Hah-vahd." Except... the university has an application pending for "The Hahvahd Tour." Oh well...

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Harvard Bails Out On Google Book Scanning Deal; Disagrees With Settlement Terms

from the and-here-come-the-problems dept

I'm on the record as being opposed to Google's decision to cave in to authors and publishers with its book scanning project. Many people I normally agree with have taken the other side, claiming that Google's agreement keeps the company out of court and creates a win-win solution. However, I still think, over the long term, this agreement is quite problematic -- and we're already seeing it at the margins. For example, Harvard has now dropped out of the scanning program, noting that it teamed up with Google because the program was going to make the library content freely and widely available. Yet, the settlement will impose charges and will greatly limit the usefulness of the library's collection. From Harvard's standpoint, this goes against what the library stands for.

I would argue that it goes directly against what Google used to stand for as well. Rather than making the world's information accessible and findable, this move is an attempt to lock up the world's information in Google's proprietary format, so that Google can charge people for it. It sets in place a forced business model that actually diminishes the potential usefulness and value of books, and sets a bad precedent for just about everyone else. It's still difficult to see any positives from this deal. It's good to see Harvard stand up for what's right, rather than giving in.

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MBAs Being Taught To Fight Open Source By Offering Closed Source Alternatives?

from the get-a-refund dept

The Slashdot crowd is reasonably up in arms of a paper jointly written by a Harvard Business School professor and a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor on ways to compete with open source competitors. Amusingly, nowhere in the paper does it suggest that one of those strategies might be to go open source yourself, embracing the actual benefits of openness and infinite goods, and focusing on better business models involving scarce goods. In fact, it doesn't even seem like the paper recognizes the rather large businesses created around open source software, with the totally false implication being that open source isn't a business, but a hobby. Frankly, the whole thing gives MBAs a bad name, by suggesting that they're not being taught to actually understand how open source can be used within a business model. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true -- at least at some schools. Much of my own journey down the path in exploring the economics of infinite goods started thanks to my own MBA professor Alan McAdams at Cornell, who was teaching how important open source models were to the success of the internet and businesses back when I first took his class in 1996 or 1997.

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ConnectU Wants Out Of Its Settlement With Facebook; Wants To Sue Again

from the oh-come-on dept

Earlier this year, we were disappointed to see Facebook agree to settle with ConnectU. ConnectU was another wannabe social network that Mark Zuckerberg worked for briefly before going off to found Facebook. The brothers behind ConnectU were unsuccessful in doing much with ConnectU, but it wasn't because Zuckerberg "stole their idea." It was because he executed much better. The "idea" itself was hardly novel at the time, as there were already a number of social networks out there. While it may have made economic sense in the short term for Facebook to settle with ConnectU (just to get the lawsuit hassle out of the way), that sort of settlement leads to more people claiming credit for something they have no real rights over.

Yet, if you thought the case was now over, you'd be wrong. Apparently the brothers behind ConnectU suddenly claim that they've come up with a "smoking gun" and they want to cancel the settlement and get back to the lawsuit. This is clearly a pure moneygrab at this point. Even if the brothers could prove that every bit of Facebook is based on code that Zuckerberg directly copied from ConnectU, it wouldn't change the reality of the situation -- which was that Zuckerberg created a service people wanted to use, and the ConnectU guys did not. They're basically demanding money to pay for their own failure to execute well. In this society, we want to reward the winners in the marketplace, not the losers.

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Turns Out It's The Kids Who Don't Play Video Games Who Are Most At Risk

from the well,-look-at-that dept

Time and time again we see headlines blaring out about how dangerous violent video games are, with politicians insisting they need to do something to "protect the children." However, every time you look closely at the research, you discover there's no real evidence that violent video games lead to violent behavior. At best, the research appears to show that violent video games makes kids emotional and excited (which... er... is what they're supposed to do) and that might lead to very slightly more aggressive behavior for a very short time. And, of course, the most damning evidence against the claim that violent video games leads to more violence is that violent crimes keep dropping as violent video games get more popular. Video gaming site Kotaku is highlighting a video interview of two Harvard professors who have written a book called Grand Theft Childhood that reviews plenty of the previously done research, as well as contributes additional research. Most of their findings support exactly what we've noticed. The previous studies don't really show an impact. But, the most interesting point is made towards the end of the video interview. In looking at boys who are more "at risk" of getting into trouble, it's the ones who don't play video games at all who show a statistically significant greater likelihood of getting into trouble, suggesting that playing video games is part of a boy's normal social setting. To be fair, the study also found that kids who played almost exclusively violent or mature video games for very long periods of time were also more at risk -- though, with no evidence of causality.

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Harvard Faculty Agrees To Free Up Its Research

from the about-time dept

While MIT has received plenty of attention over the years for its effort to free up all course materials a potentially equally as interesting move happened at Harvard yesterday, where Arts & Sciences faculty agreed to free up their research. For many years, there's been a push by some to change the process for publishing research. Typically, academic research would appear in journals that were incredibly expensive, potentially limiting the access to that research, even if the research was publicly funded. However, what this group of Harvard faculty have now done is agree that any research they publish will also be available for free online. As mentioned recently, in an age where everyone is so focused on intellectual property, it suddenly makes things like teaching and learning appear to be mighty similar to what others call theft or infringement. It's nice to see some universities starting to push back on that.

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