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. If the request is large, complex, or for something clearly commercial or you aren't sure if your request will be welcomed, contact us and we'll help you figure out the right approach.
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.
In keeping with my theme in this blog, I found an interesting paper asking some fundamental questions about problems with current copyright, with special attention to education. Here's a snippet....
In this article, we explore how the technological, social, cultural, and legal developments of the digital age challenge educators and students who seek to make use of copyrighted material for educational purposes and offer educators strategies for dealing with today’s copyright challenges.
This article is from Innovate, an online magazine. Citation information is at the end of the article and yes, I checked very carefully to make sure I could post it here. There are a number of references to new legislation and other initiatives that aim to adapt copyright law to the digital age.
How this will sort out is anyone's guess, but one step we can all take is to do our best to know and to follow current law. Bob
Recently, Google announced that a settlement had been reached with a large group of authors and publishers who were suing the giant search engine because it had scanned and indexed large numbers of books, including library collections from major universities. Many of these books were still protected by copyright. If you want to see how this works, go to http://books.google.com/ and search for a book. Not only can you see some pages from the book, you see search terms highlighted in the text.
Anyway, the news of the settlement is huge and has major implications for publishing, copyright, and on and on. What doesn't Google impact these days!
Google's own internal Blog has a pretty good description here....
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-chapter-for-google-book-search.html
In our own way, ANR is playing a role in this soap opera. Check out the "Google Books" search widget on the ANR catalog site.
On the other hand, the settlement raises ongoing questions about just what exactly constitutes a copy. Suffice it to say that the biggest battles will be about money. Unless someone out there is writing the first book in a block buster series about a Wizard Farm Advisor going off to school at Nuthatches School at the end of an invisible high speed rail link to West Davis, I don't think one of our books will be the topic........no matter how good it is!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Bob
