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Canadian University Students Taught To Protect IP
innocent_white_lamb writes "Graduate students at Carleton University (Ottawa) are taking steps to protect their intellectual property, at the same time are insuring that they are being properly recognized for their work. This is in response to the increased commercialization of research done at universities, and high-profile cases of copyright infringement by professors at the University of Toronto and Indiana University. 'The initiative will include workshops and a handbook outlining what would constitute an infraction of students' intellectual property rights, Howlett said. Examples include a student not receiving authorship on written work, or having a professor take credit for their work. "This isn't an indictment of profs at all," said Howlett. "It's just to ensure that students' rights are protected in the case that it does happen."'"
Oh for the days when universities were places for learning and not little more than businesses and when the students were more focussed on learning than making a quick buck or some recognition.
Well, it's a step in the right direction insofar as more people will be aware assinine I"P" laws exist. But it's vital people also learn that I"P" laws as they currently stand, like slavery, belong in the pages of history books. You don't need to be able to stop me passing on information to prevent plagiarism - if I say "vertigoCiel said XYZ" I have not plagiarised - but I may have infringed on your copyright preventing redistribution of XYZ. Most academics are against willful plagiarism, but you don't need copyright law to fight plagiarism, fraud provisions are entirely sufficient.
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I don't think it's just to use force to prevent you from making a copy of one of my poems; but represent yourself as its author and I'll kick your ass.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Is this a good thing that students get protected from the random professor who preys on a student's work and makes it their own or are we teaching values and mistrust now at that are at odds with a mostly open society and education?
I'm not against students recieving credit, but as with patents, I'm against people ardently claiming credit for the most insignificant things.
If any sort of this nonsensical "Intellectual Property" will become the standard way of producing research results (as opposed to old-fashioned attribution, to which the students have full rights and the University a moral obligation to protect) then this will mean the death of acedemic science. Period.
If every piece of every half-baked paper will cost $50 to read it, a typical researcher will end up with no viable access to any sort of external research.
But of course the further escalation of "Intellectual Property"-related stupidities is only bound to increase in pace, given how hell bent the "opinion makers" are on introducing greed "motivators" where they were never needed or wanted in order to divide and parcel out the body of human knowledge amongst the "worthy" mega-corporations and billionaires who will become the de-facto gate-keepers to that knowledge and subsequently, for all practical purposes, Lords and Masters of the rest of the humanity.
I foresee troubled waters ahead.
"Do it for pay or give it away." I work in the creative field too, and there's two kinds of work I do: (1) free stuff posted to my site. Anybody can have it; it is an illusion to think I can stop them, and for every dollar that I regained tracking down a "thief" to the ends of the Earth, that's ten dollars I could have earned producing more content. (2) Work I do for hire on contract. Not a pixel nor a character is done until the money is already effectively mine, at which point I sign over all rights to the customer. Tah dah! Nothing left to "steal".
And the HELL with this petty "I did it twenty years ago, so I reserve the right to exploit it forever, and stalk anybody who uses it in their forum sig." Enough people attribute me already that it's worth it to give some away. It brings me more business! And if it became necessary to prove that it was my work, I still have an archive with a date stamp to show them in court.
Sorry, but those of us who produce on a daily basis regard the attitude of clutching work from twenty years ago to keep wringing every penny out of it as a sign that the person weren't talented enough to make it in this business in the first place. Why should I be so insecure? I'm the goose that lays the golden eggs; I can always get more! Quite frankly, I'd prefer to *deny* some of the work I did in my student days - it was no good, which is why I was a student.
And for heaven's sake, you work in photography? So watermark it! In the Information Age, media is cheap - deal with it.
Doubtless, you're pissed right now. Sorry, just trying to let you know that some of us have a different way of looking at it.
Information wants to be free...but information workers want to get paid. The class has fuck all to do with payment, moron. It's about not letting others take credit for your work.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This is very different from copyright enforcement. This is about attribution. Huge difference.
Most graduate students would be more than happy to have thousands of people read their thesis. The problem arises when they don't get credited, or someone else claims ownership.
This is very different from students wanting $20 from you to read their paper.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
How does public funded schools and scholarships fit into this.
Surely if my tax dollars pay part of the tuition for the student copy writing everything he does as part of his education, then we deserve a portion of anything made from it.
I don't think it will come to this, it doesn't with the patent the schools own because public money funded the research. I just don't think it is right, it should be public domain if public money was spent to develop it.
You can teach this with a simple thought experiment, simply by asking, "If someone stole your car, would you be upset because he got a car without paying for it, or because you didn't have it anymore? If he could make a copy of your car, leaving the original intact and untouched, would you even care?"
Once that lesson has been taught, any clever student will be able to conclude on his own that it's impossible to "steal another person's IP".
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