On Monday, I spent part of the morning listening to various academics and legal experts at "Copyright and the University: An Academic Symposium," an event hosted by ex-PFFer Patrick Ross. The event was meant to address attitudes towards copyright on college campuses.

The first panel, which followed a keynote by the US Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, focused on "defining the problem." The panelists, adeptly led by Andrew Noyes of TechDaily, discussed everything from the attitudes of students towards the music industry to licensing arrangements for works included in course material. A few highlights and observations:

Continue reading Academics and Copyright . . .

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 2:45 PM | Academia , Enforcement & Remedies , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Universities

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On December 10th, ex-PFFer Patrick Ross is hosting "Copyright and the University: An Academic Symposium" at GW.
More info can be found here.

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 9:08 AM | Academia , Universities

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Aliya Sternstein's techdaily article "Moving the Campus Bookstore Online," covers proposals for the future of a digital marketplace and licensing clearinghouse for textbooks and a recent federal report on making textbooks more affordable, California state models, and publisher reactions.

The driving factor behind the study is of course the rising cost of education, of which textbooks are a part (a rather small part, but never mind). No one seems in a hurry to put the puzzle together; the two sectors of the economy in which prices notoriously rise with little accountability to consumers are education and medicine--two areas heavily subsidized by the federal government. Whither price sensitivity?

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:16 AM | Books , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Universities

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Fred Von Lohman's article in the Post chides a group of Congressmen for expecting universities to enforce copyright by fining or expelling students, or by installing filtering software. He urges instead that the university collect monies to pay the music industry for a blanket license for unlimited downloading, as they do for software. At least, it is not a compulsory license. And it seems to be a a reasonably practicable solution at one level. (One practical problem: does the license transfer the rights in the sound recordings only? Or the rights of the composers and such as well? Licenses for music distribution are notoriously hard to obtain because of this fragmentation issue. Set it aside for now).

But note one key element on which the scheme relies--in order to have any incentive to negotiate for a license, the universities and/or their students *must* be under some threat of liability. Withdraw that threat, declare downloading to be legal and legit, and the music studios lost their bargaining power. I am curious as to whether FVL would support this premise. He seems to be on the one hand objecting to the reasonableness of the threats, while supporting a solution that requires some kind of threat as a premise.

Continue reading Fred Von Lohman on Copyright In Universities . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:12 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Universities

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Solveig will be speaking at today's "Copyright Utopia Symposium," hosted by the University of Maryland University College's Center for Intellectual Property. She'll be speaking on the panel, "Licensing and the Commons as Copyright Alternatives," starting at approximately 10:30.

To view a webcast of the event, registration and payment is required. More info is available here.

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 9:24 AM | Academia , Prices, Terms, and Licensing , Universities

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Professor David Mowery, from the Haas school of the University of California-Berkeley, has a set of Bayh-Dole related publications on SSRN that he has authored with other scholars, including Arvids Ziedonis, Bhaven Sampat, Richard Nelson.

I’ve followed Mowery for years, and am especially impressed by his contributions at the National Academies and the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition to Mowery's work on Bayh-Dole, readers may be interested in his research on the history of innovation, open source software and the evolution of intellectual property rights in the software industry.

posted by Noel Le @ 12:03 AM | Academia , Patents , Universities

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A researcher from the Rochester Institute of Technology just posted an interesting looking paper on SSRN: Commercial Development of University Research: The Role of Patents, Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy Vol. 5, No. 1, Art 19.

This paper analyzes how university patents encourage university-firm collaboration for technology transfer. Focusing on factors other than competition, I find that the two may not collaborate either because the firm finds in-house development cheaper, or because of a disagreement about the potential product's profitability. In both cases, university patents can encourage collaboration by increasing the invention's diffusion time, and therefore play a role even in the absence of any competition. The model also suggests instances in which we can expect to see a greater impact of university patents on collaboration....

posted by Noel Le @ 1:39 AM | Patents , Universities

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An interesting article in The Scientist , "Public Concern for Private Funding," on the increased role of private funding in research. Unfortunately, public funding has its own pitfalls, as described by Terence Kealey in The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. So where does that leave us? Looking for a set of guidelines that will enable the private funding of research while preserving the credibility of the results. I cannot imagine that is an insurmountable obstacle.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:40 PM | Academia , Universities

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While America relies foremost on its private sector for technological innovation, our universities also do their part in the innovation ecosystem. A news story from Thailand looks at the US model of commercializing university research under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allows research institutions to patent and license valuable R&D. Some scholars such as David Mowery from Berkeley credit Bayh-Dole with expanding technology transfer from universities to industry and enabling cross-sector R&D collaborations. Now, universities in Europe and Asia may be following the American innovation approach.

Many modern technologies began as university research projects, but “only the most diligent universities have exploited the value of such inventions.” Today, “US universities fully develop and commercialize students' innovations to the extent that they are major contributors to America's economic might.” One success story in commercializing university research is Google, founded by two PhD students at Stanford. As a “result of properly managed policies”, research the Stanford students worked on became the property of the school, which in turn licensed it back to Google. “When Google went public in 2004, the value of shares held by Stanford in return for the license exceeded $200 million.”

Continue reading University Research Patenting, US Innovation a Model to Follow . . .

posted by Noel Le @ 7:43 AM | Patents , Universities

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A few months ago my 11-year-old daughter was researching a paper on Jesse Owens for social studies. She didn't go to the library, pull down reference books and fill up 3x5 index cards. She went onto Google. She found plenty of materials. But when I asked to read her completed paper, it was nothing but a cut-and-paste job from various web sites on Owens; she even included, quite randomly, part of a press release about some recent celebration in his honor.

My daughter's work ethic may not always be what I'd like it to be, but she's bright and can write more than sufficiently for a 5th grade social studies class. Yet she seemed flat-out baffled when I explained to her that the paper wasn't acceptable. "Is the information wrong?" she asked. "Did I leave something out?" No to both. But she hadn't written her own paper, and more importantly, she hadn't learned anything, as was clear when I began to quiz her about the content in her own "paper." Hard to transfer knowledge in the two seconds it takes to select and move.

Continue reading Plagiarism and the Wikipedia Generation . . .

posted by Patrick Ross @ 11:10 AM | Academia , Free Culture Movement , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Universities

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:41 PM | Big Tent , General , International , Patents , Tax-Funded IP , Universities

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posted by James DeLong @ 8:53 AM | Universities

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