EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Intellectual Property

What is the reality with respect to e-books? Will e-books finally take off? After nearly two decades of talking about how e-books are right around the corner, have we finally reached the corner?

"File sharing serves as a tuning fork for an entirely new orchestra of digital communication, interaction, and social expectation. We in higher education must provide a clear, calm, ringing voice in defining
the terms of the new world when we believe our goals and values are important not only to us but to society."

The author discusses how a recent shift in patent case law means that the ideas and methods underlying software can now be protected and assigned ownership.

Open-access projects are stimulating a broader open-content movement, which in turn is leading to the emergence of a meta-university—an accessible, dynamic, and communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.

The technology-driven disruptions of the knowledge economy offer higher education an enormous opportunity to remake ourselves - this time around collaboration, exploration, and engagement with the wider world.

The author gives an overview of the creative commons and science commons licenses and publishing options.

The author discusses the transformation on the college campus from the free exchange of ideas to the growing movement to lock down those ideas as "property".