The LTD Project Blog

In a recent email announcement, Educause provides links to collections of IP-related resources:

• Intellectual Property
  • Copyright
  • Fair Use

(Tune In Feb. 1: Copyright Fair Use and the Economy,

January 24, 2008, 21:45:16 JST)

This is a quick post to save today’s finds until I reassemble IP resources on a wiki. For previous posts on IP issues, I suggest browsing the LTD Project Blog category “IntellectualProperty”. You may find the links to the same resource collections in an earlier post.

An announcement of a live Educause event February 15 reminds me to follow up on some older intellectual property (IP) related resources. Here are a few more gleaned through the announcement – two out of three with a U.S. bent:

Educause. (2007). Federal copyright law [online resource collection]. Retrieved February 7, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=252

Educause. (2007). Scholarly communication [online resource collection]. Retrieved February 7, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=428

Public Knowledge. (2007). Policy blog: intellectual property. Retrieved February 7, 2007, from http://www.publicknowledge.org/articles/49

• “Public Knowledge is a Washington DC based advocacy group working to defend your rights in the emerging digital culture” (Public Knowledge, 2007).
• Gigi Sohn, President & Founder of Public Knowledge, is to be a special guest at that live Educause event: “The Information Commons and the Future of Innovation, Scholarship, and Creativity.”

When a colleague emailed this morning and asked for reminders of what we’d discussed yesterday, face-to-face, in a global locale that may have been a tertiary or quaternary target the day that Nagasaki got a-bombed, I sort of went ballistic. Here’s an annotated snippet of what I wrote back:

Tabula rasa, man, tabula rasa;1 let me twang your synapses!

You dutifully promised and faithfully engaged to:

a. Always bring a pulp and fiber-based notebook and indelible ink pen with you when you visit my office, and have them handy whenever you call;

b. Begin immediately listing to-do’s in your notebook the moment that they spring to mind, because if you don’t write your thoughts down, they may as well never have happened;2

c. Carefully annotate those to-do’s as to whom you’ll need to involve, what resources to obtain and distribute, and when you expect to do so;

d. Deliberately and diligently transfer all [pen & paper] notes to a byte-based format at your earliest convenience, supplementing them with electronic ticklers (reminders) as necessary;

e. Endeavor to duck and cover your pulp and fiber notebook at the earliest hint of an EMP,3 and soak the notebook with urine in case of subsequent firestorms;

…

r. Remember that all data stored electronically can be wiped out faster than ink dries.

…

If you’re interested in exploring intellectual property rights in some breadth, if not depth, below are a few more pointers to round out those in a previous post about Aussie copyright concerns. These are from three collections:

1. A working bibliography on disk (entries lacking annotations, for resources currently accessible):

Downes, Stephen. (2003). Copyright, ethics and theft. Journal of the United States Distance Learning Association 17(2), 51-62. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/ED_APR03.pdf

Downes, Stephen. (2006). A Patent Dilemma. Innovate 3(2). Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=399

Lessig, Lawrence. (2002). Free culture [Flash media recording]. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

2. Bookmarks on del.icio.us (not necessarily annotated, either):

http://del.icio.us/pab/copyright

3. Another place I’d look, Educause.

If you discover any articles at Educause (or elsewhere) that you find particularly easy to understand and applicable to our work (educational blogging), please don’t hesitate to say which and why in a comment related to each.

The message extracts below pose some hard questions about copyright laws that I wrote in reaction to the 08 Nov. Internet Industry Association (IIA) news release cited in the message. I got a pointer to the news release from the Teach and Learn Online Google Group.

New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians [news release]…

That article quotes Peter Coroneos, Chief Executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) saying, “The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this [onerous] path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures” [as the Australian parliament enacted].

Is that [the IIA's] assessment of current U.S. law accurate?

The risk scenarios here [on the IIA website] are quite illuminating….

Do you think the U.S. Congress will follow suit? [What about other countries?]

Cheers, Paul

PS: Here is a related podcast, if you’re interested, … [in which Brian Fitzgerald interviews the IIA's chief executive].

This post incorporates a RadioOpenSource program, Global Warming: Coal — It’s Cheap and Dirty (November 14, 2006), that I found at ODEO. Actually, I was looking for something else, “Is Global Warming Real? Climate Change and Our Energy Future,” by Robert Dunbar (2004), but the program link to Dunbar’s talk is defunct in ODEO (it is still available from the iTunes Store).

I created this post from an ODEO to Blogger uplink with an embedded player (above). ODEO to blog settings were easy in Firefox, even though the ODEO blog set-up interface doesn’t display properly in Camino, and Blogger doesn’t recognize ODEO as a secure interface, either.

To use the blog setting functions and generate automatically titled blog entries at ODEO, you have to register. However, registration may not be necessary if you just find a program you like, click the “Embeddable Player” link, and copy/paste the embedding code from ODEO directly into a draft blog entry.

Here is a rough and ready tabulation of the professional development interests from 2006 LTD Project application forms:

(more…)