A couple of folks have asked me questions about trademarks lately.  That makes perfect sense, of course.  If we're working to recover costs, we want a little more control than we might have before.

I'll confess that trademark law is new to me.  I need to educate myself a little more.  Hopefully, I can provide some links and best practices pretty soon.

One thing I can tell you is that formally registering a trademark with the federal government is not trivial.  It costs at least $300 and some prep time. 

More soon....

Bob

Last week,  Wendy Rotchstein from San Francisco/San Mateo emailed me this question...

Good afternoon Robert,

It's a good question.  If the request is small, I think that email permission is adequate, but only if you are confident that the person you are getting the permission from is authorized to give it.  That's a judgment call on your part, but it saves having to use a form and adding more adminstrative work.

Thanks Wendy

Bob Sams

For the past few months, a group of UCD faculty and staff have been working on a set of recommendations regarding instructional technology.  While the report hasn't been issued, discussions at the last meeting of the Campus Council for Information Technology (CCFIT) revealed that one of the very top concerns expressed by faculty about using online instructional technology regarded copyright and intellectual property. 

As in most things copyright, especially in higher education, the answer to the question of "Who owns this thing I did?"  is always, and frustratingly, "It depends."   Moreover, the faculty perception is that the answer varies with who you ask.

While there is UC and ANR policy about this stuff (yes, we're different here, too!) applying it is not easy.  Also, recent efforts to establish more comprehensive UC policy and make scholarly publishing and the use of copyrighted materials in the classroom more transparent appear to be stalled.  We do have more important things to worry about right at this moment.

However, it is just when everything seems to be on the table that we have an opportunity to support the academic quality of UC, increase the visibiity of scholarly publications, expand our service to California and the nation, and articulate the Strategic Vision we discussed so productively at the recent statewide conference.  If expanded online program delivery is really part of our future, these issues are important to us as well.

I'll try to keep you posted. 

Here's the link to the web site of the CCFIT.  http://ccfit.ucdavis.edu/index.cfm

There is a great deal of good stuff here on IT planning and governance and I'm grateful that UCD CIO Pete Seigel has asked me to serve on this committee.  Pete came to UCD from Illinois and he really does get the land grant mission and the role of the experiment station/cooperative extension continuum.

Bob

What do the Google Settlement (see earlier post) and corporate sponsorship have to do with each other?  They're connecting in my mind. 

Turns out that May 5, 2009 is the day that authors and publishers have to choose whether to "opt out" of the Google Settlement.  It's not a simple problem, but it has a pretty simple answer.  Higher education institutions like UC are not going to start proceedings against Google in the courts, so why reserve the right to do so?

Does this mean we don't care?  Absolutely not.  An ANR publication represents more than just information, it's an icon of who we are.  The same is true for a web site. 

Along with some others in ANR, I've been thinking about how we maintain our "brand" identity in this new environment.  If you've been to Google Books, you'll see that our publications appear, often in close proxmity to other brands and certainly under the Google banner.

What about in our web space?  Does the logo of a corporate sponsor undermine our values? What about a  live link?

It's making my head spin, but in a good way.  It's good because we're protecting something that is real.  We continue to ask "Is this true?"  Not only do we ask, we act to find out.