Copyright and Intellectual Property

Designed for college and university attorneys and administrators with responsibility for information technology, the NACUA Fall Workshop 2007 covers legal issues that arise at the intersection of computers and  internet with legal obligations relating to privacy, security, and intellectual property. The program begins with a session covering recent developments in digital copyright and trademark law, and includes separate tracks on copyright and intellectual property issues as well as contracting  and information technology law. Please join your colleagues November 7-9, 2007, in Washington, DC, for this opportunity for professional education, networking, and discussion.

This workshop is presented by NACUA in cooperation with EDUCAUSE.

Find out how Creative Commons copyright licenses offer greater flexibility for both intellectual property owners and users than traditional copyright in the 7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons brief from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Another recent ELI brief, 7 Things You Should Know About Open Journaling, spotlights how open journaling tools can be used for publishing peer-reviewed journals online. Browse the complete 7 Things You Should Know About… monthly series.

In this 17 minute recording, we'll hear from Cal State's Director of Academic Technology Research, Glenda Morgan.  Listen in as she shares some thoughts about her research into faculty use of technology, intellectual property, and a range of other topics.  

ABC is reporting that the MPAA have deployed sniffer dogs trained to detect CDs and DVDs into Stanstead Airport.

For the time being, Lucky and Flo are working at a FedEx shipping center at Stansted Airport where they are sniffing packages that are shipped around the world. Trainers say the dogs have been notifying customs agents of packages with discs in them. The packages have been opened but so far no pirated movies have been found.

"We're encouraged by this. It's a new tool against piracy but we welcome it and hope others will adopt such practices [...]"

Thank goodness London airports aren't swamped with other security concerns an have the time and energy to address this issue.

The Debian project has just started redistributing Sun's Java implementation after the recent relicensing. As with all Debian software, the software has been repackaged into a standard format for ease of install, upgrade, removal and testing. Previously Debian merely distributed a placeholder and users had to install Java from the Sun website.

Debian remains committed to supporting free runtimes and development environments for Java, such as Kaffe and GCJ, and we look forward to working with Sun as they explore their options for making Java more free, and extending their involvement in the free software community for other portions of Java and other projects.

The open source project Kororaa has been accused of violating the GPL, one of the core open source licences.

The numb of the problem is that some pieces of PC hardware have linux divice drivers released under non-GPL licences, which means that while the drivers can be downloaded form the hadrware manufactures website, they cannot built and linked into a kernel which is then redistributed as a whole.

This is a huge issue for LiveCDs like Kororaa, because they would have to download from the website every time they booted.

Joe Brockmeier has written a piece for newsforge on Enforcing the GPL (GNU Public License), and while the news is not good, there is substantial hope, including the information (which I'd overlooked) that because copyright has fixed term, there is no statue of limitations, so even if enforcement is very lax, we can catch up later. There had to be at least one silver lining to the continuous attempts to increase the length of copyright terms.

In this 14 minute recording, I sit down with Steve Wheatley, a VP with the American Council of Learned Societies.  Listen in as he shares thoughts on the political economy of higher education, cyberinfrastructure, open access, the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships, international scholarly exchange and building transnational communitities of scholarship, the ACLS history ebook project.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this podcast, I speak with MIT's McKenzie Smith about the Science Commons, governance of DSpace, The MIT Libraries' investigation of Semantic Web technology via their SIMILE project, grid computing vis-a-vis the SDSC Storage Resource Broker, and digital preservation.  

To learn more about the activities of the MIT Libraries,
you can view their annual report at the url below:
http://libraries.mit.edu/about/annual/ar05/technology.html


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org