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Intellectual PropertyThe popular understanding of the term, "Intellectual Property," covers a broad range of concepts even though its legal definition is much more precise. The laws concerning intellectual property are designed to protect the rights of the creators of various forms of subject matter. The subject matter may include any of the following:
- Copyright of creative and artistic works (e.g. books, movies, music, paintings, photographs, and software) gives a copyright holder the exclusive right to control reproduction or adaptation of such works for a certain period of time
- Patent of a new, useful, and non-obvious invention
- Trademark of a distinctive sign which is used to distinguish the products or services of different businesses
- An industrial design right protects the form of appearance, style or design of an industrial object
- A trade secret (which is sometimes equated with, or a subset of, confidential information) is secret, non-public information concerning the commercial practices or proprietary knowledge of a business
At De Anza much of the interest in intellectual property concerns copyright, because many of our faculty are involved in the creation of teaching materials that involve handouts, web sites, books, video material, music and other works of art, as well as software. A good source of information about copyright is the Copyright Compliance Center, which has a specific publication with results of research they have done on Content Use on Campus (will download as a PDF document) for higher education administrators. I found it particularly enlightening because it demonstrated how little knowledge most people have about intellectual property, even in higher education where many faculty are eager to protect their own intellectual property.
An alternate form of protecting material has been developed by Creative Commons. Their belief is that the methodology they have created allows for a wider sharing of intellectual property while still protecting the rights of content developers, thus contributing to the betterment of society at large.
I have developed a white paper on the "Rights of a Content Developer" (in MS Word format) for distribution under a Creative Commons license to anyone (but particularly to faculty) who might be interested. EDUCAUSE has also published 7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons
in a PDF document as a part of their "7 Things You Should Know About ..." series.
Fair Use
One of the more interesting points of contention, and even misunderstanding, on a college campus is that of "fair use." Many faculty do not fully understand what fair use means in terms of their own use of others' intellectual property. And we may be heading to a crisis point soon on its use as more and more faculty make liberal use of others' material believing that they are covered by fair use laws. However, a recent survey by the Copyright Clearance Center (will download a PDF document) indicated that many faculty (51%) indicated that the material they post to their course management system (CMS) are full-text, rather than links to the original work. The CCC goes on to point out that a case-by-case analysis "would reveal that not all of them meet fair use requirements."
Video-based Information about Copyright Law
Here's
an interesting (and entertaining) interpretation of current copyright law and fair use (in
video format), by Eric Faden, a senior faculty member at Bucknell University. I say "interesting" because the video uses clips from
Disney (who is notorious for protecting their intellectual property) movies to explain some of the issues about copyright, with a
focus on "fair use." It will be interesting to see if Disney takes any action against the creators of this video.
For a more academic approach to intellectual property and copyright watch this Real video webcast (and accompanying PowerPoint presentation) of a keynote address, titled "What Faculty Need to Know to Publish and Teach in the Digital Age" to a group of faculty at UCLA by James Hilton, currently the CIO and Head Librarian at the University of Virginia (and a friend of mine). I think his talk is especially interesting because he argues that the writers of the Constitution created copyright to promote learning and research, not necessarily to protect the potential monetary value inherent in intellectual property.
Open Use
"Open use" refers to an IP (intellectual property) owner making his or her content available without all the restrictions of copyright. It is a method for gaining wider distribution of one's work and can be simply given away without any restrictions or through the use of a Creative Commons license (see above). I have an FAQ on why someone may want to make their material available for open use.
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