We've written a few times about employers snooping through the emails of employees, and for the most part, courts have found this to be legal. There are a few exceptions -- such as for attorney/client communications -- but for the most part, if you're using work provided email, they can spy on it. Of course, just because they can doesn't mean they should. As we've been pointing out for over a decade, doing so probably fosters an environment of paranoia, which may not be the most productive. Still, it's a bit surprising to see that Harvard University chose to snoop through the emails of staff members in trying to hunt down the source of a leak. Specifically, the university searched the emails of 16 deans, telling them about the search a few days later. Again, even though this is likely legal, it seems odd that a university like Harvard would do it, as it inevitably creates distrust with some of its most important staffers. Indeed, the news apparently has faculty and staff up in arms.

Havard has defended the search by arguing it was very limited -- just to specific accounts and just to subject lines:

Consequently, with the approval of the Dean of FAS and the University General Counsel, and the support of the Dean of Harvard College, a very narrow, careful, and precise subject-line search was conducted by the University's IT Department. It was limited to the Administrative accounts for the Resident Deans — in other words, the accounts through which their official university business is conducted, as distinct from their individual Harvard email accounts. The search did not involve a review of email content; it was limited to a search of the subject line of the email that had been inappropriately forwarded. To be clear: No one's emails were opened and the contents of no one's emails were searched by human or machine. The subject-line search turned up two emails with the queried phrase, both from one sender. Even then, the emails were not opened, nor were they forwarded or otherwise shared with anyone in IT, the administration, or the board. Only a partial log of the 'metadata' — the name of the sender and the time the emails were sent — was returned.

"The Resident Dean whose account had been identified was asked about the incident and voluntarily reviewed his/her own sent items and confirmed that she/he had indeed forwarded the message to two students. Although the Resident Dean's actions violated the expectations of confidentiality surrounding the Administrative Board process, those involved in the review and the conversation with the individual were sufficiently convinced that it was an inadvertent error and not an intentional breach. The judgment was made not to take further action.

The issue, though, is the expectation of privacy and the level of trust built up between staffers and the university -- and actions like this, even when done narrowly and carefully, can break down that trust in significant ways.

Torrentfreak has the story of an economics professor (of all things) who has apparently received a patent on a way to try to force students to buy expensive textbooks. The professor, Joseph Henry Vogel, is positioning this patent (8,195,571) as an "anti-piracy" technique, though it appears that it works equally well in preventing students from sharing a single textbook or merely checking the textbook out of the library. The details of the patent are hardly new or innovative either. The basics are that the class has both a textbook and an online discussion board -- and buying the textbook provides you a code that allows you to enter the discussion board. In theory, you could also just buy the code.

There'a all sorts of idiocy involved in this situation. Let's just separate out a few examples:

1. How the hell does something like this get patented in the first place? There is a tremendous amount of prior art in the form of things like "one-time" use codes for video games and other digital offerings to limit the used sales market. And yet this still gets approved? USPTO examiner James D. Nigh should be ashamed for letting this piece of garbage get approved.
2. The claims here (the patent only has four) are so broad and so general, I don't see how it passes the non-obvious test, nor how it is anything more than mashing together a few different things that are widely available already and have been for years. After the KSR ruling the USPTO was supposed to reject broad patents that just combined basic concepts already found in the market.
3. How could a professor of economics actually think that locking up access to information is a good idea? That alone would make me avoid any class that he taught, as his understanding of information economics is way, way off.
4. It's sad that anyone in academia would think that this is a good idea. In an age where Harvard and MIT are investing a ton into opening up access, this guy is focused on locking it down.

The whole thing is extraordinary for how bad of an idea it is -- and the fact that a patent was actually issued on this only compounds the ridiculousness.

With the big Facebook IPO dominating the tech news, the folks over at the Boston Globe have highlighted a point that hasn't received much, if any, attention. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook (with the vestigial "the" as a prefix) while he was a student at Harvard. Many universities these days claim ownership of any kind of company that students create while there. But, in this case, Harvard did absolutely nothing. The article contrasts that to Google (Stanford took a chunk) and Netscape (University of Illinois got into a nasty legal fight leading to a cash settlement).

A lot of this goes back to the ridiculous infatuation universities have had over the past few decades with trying to justify their failing tech transfer offices. Tons of universities set up "tech transfer" offices in the 80s (at the urging of the federal government, and driven by the disastrous Bayh-Dole Act). These universities had visions of massive profits flowing back when companies used the ideas of their brilliant researchers and commercialized them. The problem, of course, is that this is not how innovation actually works. Turning pure research into a product is not a simple process, and it doesn't happen very often. Great companies are usually driven by fulfilling consumer needs, not spotting some random bit of research. But the tech transfer offices overvalued their research, insisting that the idea was the key part, and thus they should be paid handsomely for it. For the vast majority of universities that has proven to be a huge failure. Tech transfer offices cost significant money to set up and staff, however, so universities have recognized that what was supposed to be a profit center has been a significant black hole for money. In response, there's been an increased focus on trying to claim ownership of any successful startup created by students, really as a weak attempt to justify the massive disaster of their tech transfer setup.

But Harvard -- whether it was wisely or due to ignorance -- chose not to go that path. And, as the article notes, this actually has reflected quite well on the school:

Fortunately, Harvard’s minor role in Facebook’s history has attracted a different reaction: a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster, a reinvigorated reputation as a dream school for entrepreneurial teens, and warm feelings among millionaire alumni who may become large donors. By contrast, few know that modern web browsing was born at the University of Illinois, and Netscape’s embittered founders vowed never to give another dime to their alma mater-turned-adversary.

The article covers a few other crazy cases, including one where a former student ended up in jail in a dispute with the University of South Florida. Similarly, the University of Missouri apparently tried to claim ownership of a popular iPhone app, because the student had entered it into a university business plan competition.

In an age where we see so much overclaiming and this ridiculous growth of "ownership society" where everyone tries to claim ownership over "ideas" they had little to do with, Harvard really does deserve kudos for not going down that path.

News that Harvard University is the latest to join the growing revolt against the exorbitant pricing of academic journals caused something of a stir recently -- although it has been pointed out that its case would be stronger if it followed its own advice and made the Harvard Business Review open access, or at least cheaper.

But here's an area where Harvard, together with MIT, is being more pro-active in helping to make knowledge more widely available online:

EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

EdX will build on both universities’ experience in offering online instructional content. The technological platform recently established by MITx, which will serve as the foundation for the new learning system, was designed to offer online versions of MIT courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning. Certificates of mastery will be available for those who are motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.

MIT's MITx platform already offers some MIT courses online, and is open source:

EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so it can be used by other universities and organizations that wish to host the platform themselves. Because the learning technology will be available as open-source software, other universities and individuals will be able to help edX improve and add features to the technology.

The hope is that other universities will join with Harvard and MIT to make EdX one of the primary platforms for online learning. Interestingly, it will also be used to research how people learn using digital technology -- and how it can be deployed more effectively:

MIT and Harvard will use the jointly operated edX platform to research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The edX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful. The findings of this research will be used to inform how faculty use technology in their teaching, which will enhance the experience for students on campus and for the millions expected to take advantage of these new online offerings.

This looks like an important move for online learning, not least because of the scale of the financial support:

The initiative will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., to be owned and governed equally by the two universities. MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration.

Those funds and the projects they will catalyze could boost efforts to make university courses more widely available, complementing the growing success of open access in opening up published materials.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

A recent study (pdf) by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell at Harvard is getting some press for pointing out that sharing information about yourself is "intrinsically rewarding." In other words, the reason people use Twitter to tell you about what they're eating for lunch, is because it feels good to do so. I don't think that's a particularly surprising finding, but it might counteract some of the claims about how using such sites are making everyone lonely. Of course, the attention getting line is the part about triggering the same parts of the brain as sex -- though the details suggest it's really the same kind of thing as getting a brief glimpse of attractive members of the opposite sex. In other words, science has proved that talking about yourself to lots of people and seeing attractive people make your brain happy. Case closed.

Techdirt has published several posts recently about the growing anger among scholars over the way their work is exploited by academic publishers. But there's another angle to the story, that of the academic institutions who have to pay for the journals needed by their professors and students. Via a number of people, we learn that the scholars' revolt has spread there, too:

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called "providers") to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices.

As a result, Harvard's Faculty Advisory Council has come to the following conclusion:

major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

So what's the solution? Open access, of course. Here are the Faculty Advisory Council's suggestions for how to promote it:

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH [Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard] in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies.

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access.

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning.

If one of the world's top and presumably wealthiest universities says the current approach to academic publishing "cannot be sustained", you know that something is seriously wrong with that system. Coupled with the more than 10,000 academics who have now joined the Elsevier Boycott, this latest turn of events suggests that the tipping point for open access is close.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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.

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...

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.

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.