Surreal Estate

Copyright issues over intellectual property is something I have encountered a lot in recent months. In my spare time I write 'jokes' for a friend who is a stand-up comedian, and a few months ago, while sharing thoughts over a couple of drinks, I shared with him an idea I'd had around four years ago for a TV show. Just as the atmosphere and landscape of the fictional Wessex famously inspired Thomas Hardy's writing, this idea too had its muse: a £1.99 book from ASDA.

That book, like many of my literary impulse-buys over the years, spent years gathering dust on the frantically stacked bookcase in my room. When I finally rediscovered the book, I discovered the it had a section which was of particular interest: America's Loony Laws (I've mentioned this topic in an earlier post). This section was brilliant! The things they’ve outlawed in the US! For example, it is illegal in Illinois to go fishing on your wedding day whilst making love to your wife; in Alaska it is illegal to push a moose from a moving aircraft; in landlocked Oklahoma, it is illegal to hunt for whales. Now, my understanding of the law is that it is mostly reactionary – people don’t come up with every law upon the inception of society. No, instead, what happens is that they set down the basics – don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t touch the genitalia of the young – and then the rest of the laws crop up as a response to some scenario which has led to trouble. Perhaps there was a nasty accident involving fishing hooks and wedding tackle in Illinois. Perhaps the governor of Alaska had a lovely Sunday lunch interrupted by a live moose crashing through his ceiling. Perhaps there was a mishap involving whalers and an extremely large lady in a swimming pool in Oklahoma. Who knows? There is almost another book’s worth of material in explaining how these things came about. But that’s not what interested me, was it?

You see, I had grander ideas than writing a book: I wanted to be a television star. So, I wrote a pitch for a show in which some friends and I would attempt to break fifty laws, in fifty states in fifty days, in a bid to become America's Least Wanted. Now this pitch sat somewhere on my hard-drive for around four years without anyone reading it - I'm well stocked on ideas, just not on contacts in the television industry. However, when years later I met Jamie (my stand-up comedian friend) and found out he had plenty of television contacts, I remembered my idea and told him about it. He thought it was a great idea, and an excellent opportunity for a free holiday - the worst that could happen is that we get deported, which means that we'd only need a one way plane ticket. We're saving money here!

And so the pitch was sent out to around thirty television companies, and sure enough, one of them became interested in picking it up. They were quite a big company, and I can't name them for legal reasons (because of the implications of what I am about to tell you). Now, this company requested that I send them an extended piece of prose detailing the idea (much of what is written above is adapted from what I sent to them). I, of course, acquiesced in this request. And this is where the story gets interesting...

I sent this in February 2008. In March 2008 a new television production company was incorporated in the UK and US, and the first television show they have patented is... you guessed it - mine! Of course, I have never met with or communicated with any of their board (although I suspect someone who knows them may know of me) and so this, legally, is an unfortunate coincidence for me - my four year old idea gets thought up by someone else just a month after I have told lots of people in the television industry about it.

And this rather long digression brings me to my point - just how do you prove ownership of intellectual property?

Learning The Hard Way

Looking at the small print on my contract, it appears as though the ownership of the intellectual property rights to any resources I produce whilst employed by Newcastle College is defaulted to them. If I upload a set of lecture notes I have written to our Blackboard site, although authored by me, they legally belong to the college. In corporate law, an equivalent clause would most likely be in breach of fair contract terms governing business to business relations*1, and similarly consumers receive protection from contracts which unfairly favour one party over another*2. What I'm not trying to do here is moan about a perceived injustice; I'm merely exploring potential avenues around this contractual nightmare.

I am in what I suspect is a fairly unique position in FE: I have negotiated a subject link with one of the UK's most prestigious universities, and in the process secured an annual scholarship for one of my students and negotiated a publishing deal. Quite impressive, I feel, for someone so underqualified! However, there appears to be a conflict of interest here - if I publish a book via this university's publishing company, the copyright belongs to them (with royalty payments heading my way), and this entails that my students must wait for the books to be pressed and then buy them; if I publish an electronic copy on Blackboard before the books go to press (the most pragmatic solution as a teacher), the copyright seemingly belongs with the college. If I make a mistake in choosing here, I may indeed learn the hard way about intellectual property rights - once again! I need answers, gosh darn it!

Avenues to explore

One solution that has come to mind is to incorporate a limited company i.e. Andrew Haggerstone Ltd, produce the resources as products of this company, outsource the purchase of all resources used in the classroom to this company, and have this company invoice me for a sum of £0.00. Now, this is a bit tricky - it involves paperwork, paying incorporation fees, filing tax returns, and generally facing the bemusement of the college's management structure! Also, I'm not a solicitor, so I have no idea of whether or not this would work!

So what other avenues might we navigate in the surreal estate business?

There are what are termed the 'moral rights' of an author. According to The UK Copyright Service, "moral rights are concerned with the protection of the reputation of the author. There are two fundamental moral rights that belong to the author of a copyright work: [i] the right to claim authorship, [and ii] the right to object to any treatment of the work which would be ‘prejudicial to personal honour or reputation’. Moral rights exist separately from economic rights and cannot be sold or given away."*3 However, it would seem as though the right to claim authorship is not really in dispute here, it is the right to ownership of the work.

A useful distinction ought to be drawn at this point. There are what are termed 'scholarly works' - these are articles, books and conference papers - and contractually I am entitled to the copyright of these things. However, anything 'produced for the purposes of running the course' which I teach belongs to the college. This implies that there would be no conflict if I was to produce modified, but distinct, lecture notes based upon the work I publish.

Shared Resources & Collective Intelligence

Even if we can protect ourselves from 'the establishment' when it comes to copyright issues, what if we wanted to protect ourselves from our colleagues. I am not, of course, advocating the viewpoint that we should not share resources - I actually believe that the free distribution of information and ideas should extend much further than it currently does - but what if we didn't want someone stealing the credit for our best idea?

Here, the major concern would appear to be about electronic resources ; anything you have been fortunate enough to have published in print is protected by the copyright agreements mentioned above. Electronic resources pose a slightly different problem.

Scenario 1: You upload a learning resource to a website for your students/colleagues to access, but you do not want this resource, or elements of it, to be redistributed or reproduced by anyone. How do you protect your work?

One approach is that of 'watermarking', which "attempt[s] to provide copyright owners with the desired degree of protection, and to act as a disincentive to data piracy"*4. This process embeds data into the file (which may be a video clip for instance), and this data contains the details of ownership and any restriction on use. The process of 'fingerprinting' works in much the same way. For those of you who are familiar with the image editing suit Photoshop, watermarking is something which can be visibly inserted into digital images, which in turn places a restriction on how that image may be used in practice - if your name is across an important portion of that image (which may be uploaded to a public source such as Flickr, Photobox or even a social networking site like Facebook), then without the means of removing the watermark, that image becomes impractical to use. Watermarking and fingerprinting can therefore be used to prevent anyone from utilising resources you have designed.

Scenario 2: You're happy for Alex to use your resources (she asked nicely, and she always smiles at you when you go in the staff room), but you don't want Kyra to get her hands on them (you're pretty sure she's not actually foreign, and she just puts on that accent to make herself appear more 'arty'):

Watermarking and fingerprinting both belong to a copyright process known as steganography. The limitation of this type of protection is that it is passive - it requires you (or an expensive solictor) to detect when someone has gone ahead and used your resources regardless.

There is another form of protection which would potentially provide protection from your resources being redistributed by those few people you were initially happy to allow use of your resources. This is known as cryptography, and a method of restricting use can be found in what are termed 'digital signatures'.

According to Sandy Shaw, "this service enables the originator of a data object to provide the receiver with the means by which the origin of the object can be authenticated."*5 In other words, without the permission of the originator (distributed, for example, by means of a one-use pass-code such as that used with software packages), the resource simply cannot be accessed. Alex can use it, but Kyra cannot - she requires a unique pass-code, and attempting to use Alex's will simply alert you (thanks to the wonders of the internet) to the fact that two seperate IP addresses are attempting to use one pass-code. Similarly, the digital signature method can even alert you to any attempts (even by Alex) to modify your resource.

For the intellectual property liberals, though, such restrictions on use are probably unwarranted. In fact, it seems like lots of you (well, of us, I'm one of you) have started a movement which has been dubbed 'collective intelligence'*6. This is simply collaborating on resources to ensure they are of the highest standard. An example (though not exemplar) is Wikipedia. Resources such as this naturally raise issues over 'moral rights' of authorship, but even though these rights are apparently inalienable, many of us 'lefties' have decided to set them aside to contribute to resources of this nature. And here I don't don't mean to make light of things when I say 'lefties' - it would appear as though there is some genuine concern that people of a left-wing nature are more inclined to contribute*7. One can only speculate that something about an affiliation with capitalism and the right makes you more inclined to concern yourself with issues over copyright! But the right need not fear, for they have an equivalent - Conservapedia - "where homosexuality is defined, not as 'sexual attraction between people of the same gender' as on Wikipedia, but as 'an immoral sexual lifestyle that goes beyond the boundaries that God has set up.'"*8 Cyberspace appears to the venue of an escalating conflict, with collective intelligence providing the ammunition for its participants; will the spoils of war be intellectual property?


References:

1. Business Link, Unfair Contract Terms, http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?type=RESOURCES&itemId=1074405689
2. Office of Fair Trading, Unfair Contract Terms Guidance, http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/reports/unfair_contract_terms/oft311cons.pdf
3. The UK Copyright Service, http://copyrightservice.co.uk/protect/p12_writers_copyright,
4. Sandy Shaw, Overview of Watermarks, Fingerprints and Digital Signatures, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001244.htm#_Toc456162870,
5. Ibid.
6. The New Media Consortium, 2008 Horizon Report, http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf
7. See, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJEeyLeqJHc
8. Ibid.

Keeping It Real

So, as someone seemingly ideologically opposed to technology, what resources have I used which don't involve technology and have been successful? Very few to be honest - I tend to, at the very least, incorporate a PowerPoint into most of my lectures. I should probably try and move away from my reliance on the PC.

Things I have tried and that have worked:

1) Balderdash

There is a fantastic board game of this name, which is great fun to play. The basic concept of the game is that you are given a word to define, or a sentence to finish, and you have to make up a definition or an ending. I love this game so much because one of the sections is on crazy American laws (well, it's supposed to be laws generally I think, but funnily enough the Americans have conquered pretty much the whole category) such as "In Oklahoma it is illegal for dogs to congregate on private property in groups of three or more without written consent from the mayor." Now, we would be given just the 'In Oklahoma it is illegal to' bit of that, and have to make up an ending. The other players then choose which one they suspect the correct answer to be, and if they guess yours, you get a point. In essence, you are being rewarded for lying convincingly!

I've used this same game with my Critical Thinking group. At first, I played with funny American laws - just so they got the point, and I got a laugh. Then I moved onto definitions - they had one that I had written, and so had to come up with a more authoritative/convincing definition. This really helped them develop an authoritative writing tone, as well as helping them learn the key terms.

2) Pairs

An oldie but a goodie. I modified matching pairs of cards together so that it involved the kinesthetic element of moving around the room.

Each person was given a card, and someone else in the group had a card which 'matched' theirs. It didn't have the same word on it, but instead had an analogous word. They had to find their partner by describing the thing on their card, without using the word that was actually on the card. For example, BRAIN was matched with COMPUTER (I used a general theme of body parts, simply because I was aiming to explain analogies generally). I think this game could be adapted to all manner of things - matching words with definitions, finding compatible or rival theories in subjects, matching theorists with theories etc. I did type the cards up though, so it's not like I avoided computers altogether

3) Playing with dolls

This was a philosophy-specific idea that I once used. I gave every person a cheap action man type figure (bought in bulk from the pound store) and a pair of scissors. The aim of the lesson was to get the students thinking about what the essential features of a person are. By this I mean, what makes the difference between a person and a non-person (like a stone, or perhaps a kitten).

We discussed what they each felt that they could 'lose' and still be the same person. The dolls were there to prompt them to think at first in a physical sense. If they felt that they could lose it, they could cut it off the doll. Obviously, clothes, arms, and legs are the first things to go, and then things start getting trickier: what if we could replace the heart and lungs with mechanical alternatives? can you survive without your brain? is there a soul in there somewhere? etc. This, of course, is a much condensed version of the debate! But it seemed to be a successful activity.

The Posthuman Condition

An interesting discussion came up with one of my Philosophy classes last week. By this, I don't mean to imply that an interesting discussion in this setting is a rarity, simply that the content of the discussion was about developing online teaching and learning resources. And yes, I did mean interesting!

Throughout the year I have used our Blackboard site in order to propagate copies of lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations and pdf versions of numerous things I legally should not be producing. Many students have found this very helpful, while others, as it emerged through conversation, saw this as a workable alternative to attending lessons. So, being a philosopher, I began to speculate as to what the future might hold for the classroom environment as the widespread use of e-learning and the complexity of available resources grows at an alarming rate.

I recalled an article that I read in The Economist very recently, entitled Nomads at Last. The article detailed the rise of wireless internet, and speculated (in short) that the widespread availability of information whilst on the move would have a number of effects for working life, the primary shift being one towards a nomadic culture wherein the traditional 'office' would be replaced with a series of gadgets that would allow the employee to work from any location, theoretically worldwide (although the article notes that travelling and the ability to travel do not necessarily coincide). The second shift was far more radical, perhaps suprising and a great deal more troublesome. This shift was towards social isolation.

Although the article, probably correctly, predicts that people in the future will be able to utilise this technology to work from home and thus spend more time with their family, it also hints towards the development of an insularity amongst family groups. With less need to leave the home, there will be fewer encounters with 'strangers' - the people next to us on the bus or train, the people you simply pass in the street and politely smile at or say 'hello' to. And this cultural shift is already noticeable around schools and colleges - young people I encounter every day seem to be socially isolating themselves, even within their peer groups. I am sure you have observed for yourself how young people who are together, whether it is in an elevator, or isat on the grass enjoying the sun, or walking down the street, each have their own i-Pod, playing their own playlist, and the shared experience is simply a one of physical, not intellectual, proximity.

Will this technological revolution claim as its victims the art of conversation and debate, the basics of social interaction, or the desire to share our interests with those we think of as friends? Perhaps this is being a little alarmist and reactionary, but we should not forget that in education we are hoping to shape the minds of the future, and these minds will become harder to shape if we cannot converse in a shared medium. If interactive conversation becomes alien, then what use will a classroom be?

So what will the future hold?

If the bleak picture above seems unlikely, then what exactly should we expect from e-Learning in the future? In a report by The e-Learning Guild published in April 2006, there had been respectively a 32% and 31% increase in Blogging and Podcasting in education on the previous year. That was two years ago, and while these technologies are not common-place for many teaching staff, they almost certainly will be with many younger staff whose involvement with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will have made these terms exceptionally familiar. The very fact that I am currently writing a blog, something which I have not done before today, and it is for the express purpose of being trained to teach, is indicative of just how important the people behind teacher education feel these technologies are.

In fact, in a 2008 report by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, this suspicion is confirmed. The report details key emerging technologies which either are currently in use, or it is predicted will come into use in the near future. These include:

• Grassroots video - videos produced inexpensively by students and teachers to share information and ideas;
• Collaboration webs - an online shared resource area for teachers to upload resources and edit other people's work;
• Mobile broadband - access to broadband internet via mobile phones or PDA's;
• Data 'mash-ups' - databases which have been combined to form supra-interconnected databases of information;
• Collective intelligence - pieces of work which have been collaborated upon for student use, for example, Wikipedia;
• Social operating systems - such as the networking sites mentioned above.

These technologies all actively contribute to the social isolation of the individual: collaboration webs and social operating systems will remove the need for teachers to talk to one another in the staff room in order to share best practice. Students, similarly, will see changes to their social interaction - where once we 'called for' someone by knocking on their door, we later telephoned in advance; where once we telephoned, we later text messaged; where once we text-messaged, later we 'facebooked'. Each step becomes a little less personal (the latter being, in fact, extremely public).

There are unquestionable benefits to technologies such as podcasting - creating short revision videos is something I had hoped to do this year in order to help students revise on the move. But if we extend this technology to its limits, entire lessons can be delivered via podcast. Furthermore, as webcam and video conferencing technology develops, what is to say that there could not be interactive lessons delivered from the home of the teacher into the home of the student?

In the FE sector, this may be particularly appealing; colleges are funded per student enrolled and removing the physical limitations of a classroom will open up a potentially endless stream of funding for the most attractive colleges. Of course, by most attractive college, I don't mean in terms of the physical campus, but perhaps a virtual one, or more suitably, by those attaining the best results. What is certain is that making friends at such a college will be a vastly different experience from the one that you and I had.

Will the future blame us?

American poet Ogden Nash once quipped, "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long."1 This is a sentiment I may have hinted at sharing over the course of this blog, but it is one which I feel I should clarify. If technology moves on, and people don't, historically this has only left people behind. The Luddites of the agricultural revolution in Britain became de facto terrorists, marginalised by a rapidly changing society. We should embrace technological change, but not neglect our duty to impart into learners the skills to cope with a variety of challenges. If social interaction gives way to isolation through technology, and we encourage or enable this, then we are not preparing young people for all of life's challenges. I would like to think that there will always be a place for face to face conversation, a place where mobile phones, PDA's, and i-Pods are put away for the preferred company of a close friend, for the preferred soundtrack of a real voice; I would like to think that place is the pub!



References

1. Ogden Nash. (2008, May 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:12, May 18, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ogden_Nash&oldid=211338016

Recommended Reading

Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Phoenix Press, 1999.