Legal and Ethical Issues On The Internet“open source textbooks represent an exciting, liberating and inevitable change. But there are some real concerns that we need to address in order to help this format reach its full potential. Including: how to create a coherent narrative out of a chorus of anonymous voices, how to prevent plagiarism, and how to ensure superior scholarship.” if:book
Since the early 20th century, there have been waves of “professionalism” that we as a nation have called on to answer the problems of the day. In the early to mid decades of the century, social workers, educators and economists helped make sense of the transition to modernism and assimilation of swarms of European immigrants. Shortly after World War II, we called upon mathematicians and scientists to show us how to win the cold war and venture into outer space, and in the 1980s and 1990s, we placed our faith in wired prodigies to pioneer the transition to the next century. As we settle into the 21st century, a new need is upon us. Academics, whose minds have been sequestered and marginalized for decades behind Ivy-covered walls, are needed now more than ever to come from the shadows and shape the public consciousness; in the areas they know best.
While there is clearly a need and reward system in place to encourage academic contributions to open source knowledge bases like Wikipedia, another, less grandiose way for academics to rejoin the public debate is through a radical rejection of conventional copyright regulations by embracing what is affectionately termed “copyleft” or applying a “some rights reserved” license to original research and writing.
On the bottom of all my Online Research pages readers will notice a small icon with the following text: “Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share A like 2.5 License.” What does this mean? How does it compare to traditional copyright rules, and most importantly, why does it matter?
While Congress and the courts continue to debate the government’s role in promoting the interest of science while balancing businesses’ rights to protect their property, a small revolution is taking place, waged by individuals dually concerned about their rights and the public domain. Creative Commons evolved out of the same paradigm as the open source movement – specifically the idea of creating general knowledge for the common good, with provision for both intellectual and monetary gain.
In the United States (and most other countries who participate in the WIPO Copyright Treaty) “all rights reserved” is the default copyright protection guaranteed to any author, as soon as the item (text, audio, visual) is created. All rights reserved offers broad protection needed by most commercial entities, but not necessarily by academics and researchers, who may place more weight on the ideas than the revenue generated by the work. Modifying this “all rights reserved” guarantee was, until fairly recently, beyond the realm of most academics. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded by Stanford University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, works to help authors navigate a flexible middle ground between “all rights reserved” and “no rights reserved.” The result is a common sense approach to copyright protection that promotes two goals: the first is to allow authors to determine their own level of sharing and protection, and the second is to build up a repository of knowledge under the same umbrella.
For academics, especially for proponents of online learning and distance education, the current copyright regulations enacted under the TEACH act may prove to be too onerous to include many traditional copyright documents in a lesson plan. An instructor may forgo the inclusion of a crucial document because gaining permission may not be timely, or may be costly or simply unattainable. The result then, is the opposite of what we assume is the author’s primary intention in publishing their work: contributing to knowledge in the field. (The other possibility is that the work will be used, illegally, without permission, and by extension, respecting one of the author’s intentions, but not the author’s rights.)
M.I.T. recognized the legal difficulties which conventional copyright laws held for course design and available resources, and it became one of the first, major academic institutions to assign a Creative Commons license to their entire course offering. They assigned a “Some Rights Reserved” license, which means you can use the material free of charge, you can modify it, copy it and distribute it, you just can’t sell it. MIT has increased its online course offering from 32 in 2002 to close to 1500 by August 2005. They will have their entire course offering online by 2007.
Rice University, Tufts, and Carnegie Mellon now join MIT, in hosting their own OpenCourseWare sites. In addition to Creative Commons licensed courses, there are over three million web sites using a Creative Commons license, and the number is growing daily. (For example, all weblogs created by students and faculty at Harvard University Law School contain a default license, as do all users of Movable Type blogging software.) Despite the copyleft label, The Heritage Foundation publishes all its research online with a Creative Commons license, making their research papers freely available for all uses (which might come in handy for a political science class).
In an academic setting, then, a Creative Commons license allows a faculty member to both contribute to the public domain as well as protect other authors’ rights.
You can be part of this quiet revolution by assigning a Creative Commons license to your own research and writing (as I have done here) and by reading more about the process at Creative Commons. They offer several layers of protection, depending on your needs (the most common is considered “some rights reserved” which means you can use the item in question, but you can not profit from it). Each license comes with a “human-readable summary,” which demystifies the process for both the creator and the person hoping to use the item. There is also a full, legalese version and finally, there is a machine-readable version, which codes the document electronically for inclusion in search engines. You can also submit your article to a peer-reviewed, open access journal (this page specifically addresses the benefits of open access journals).
Conversely, when designing a course, specifically a course with an online component, you can search the repository for work to include. Creative Commons has partnered with Google to harness their search engine with the machine-readable meta tags previously mentioned. You can also search the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals.
This means you can search for text, audio and video that you can include in your lesson plans without seeking the author’s permission or jumping through major copyright hurdles.
