The Ed Techie

Should universities break copyright law?

[Note - I know others have expressed this, David Wiley and Lawrence Lessig I think, but couldn't find their quotes, so if anyone has them, please let me know and I'll work them in]

A few things coalesced for me today. For a start Alan Cann sent me a link to this video on Boing Boing. It's a remix of Rip! Brett Gaylor's documentary on remixing and copyright, and makes the point about the ludicrous nature of copyright very well. The essential argument is that copyright is now used to prevent creativity, not protect the creators. It is a control mechanism. The culture clashes it reveals are truly revealing (the chap in the interview with Chuck D is like some nasty Hollywood villain), and this culture clash is fundamental in how our society develops.

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Secondly, John Naughton gave a seminar on Zittrain's The Future of the Net at the Open University. I couldn't make it, but Doug live-blogged it here. The book is about how the Net could be locked down, and controlled, because this seems like a logical thing to do against the uncertainty of an unknowable, open future.

Thirdly, I've had the audio pulled from yet another of my YouTube videos, with the ominous statement "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by WMG. The audio has been disabled". The track was by Death Cab for Cutie and I know a few people have discovered the band because of the video - so the argument that they are protecting the artist doesn't stand up.

Fourthly, I've been involved in some course production, and the rights clearance is always a tortuous issue - even to include one of my own articles in the course.

Lastly, WriteToReply put up the latest output from the Digital Britain Report, a proposal to create a Digital Rights Agency. The proposal says some good things:

"In the old analogue and physical world a lot of the value in creative content is protected by restricting where and when it can be accessed....But that model is increasingly irrelevant online. "

But then it rather lacks the strength of its own convictions and concentrates on how we might enforce copyright, and starts throwing in heavy threats:

"we set out a narrowly drawn legislative proposal to reduce significantly unlawful P2P activity. This should be seen as complementary to a rights agency that delivers a robust self-regulatory framework, including action to prevent and reduce online piracy. This should make a real difference. However, it has to be made to work by the industry participants,...But the Government‟s objective of significantly reducing the level of online copyright infringement, and in particular unlawful P2P file-sharing (of which we set ourselves a target last year to achieve that reduction within 2 to 3 years), should not be doubted."

I read this as 'If the ISPs don't play ball we'll get really tough'. This is about control again, not about creating the environment for a digital economy where reuse and remixing is seen as the lifeblood. Perhaps most telling is the Wordle of the document:

Which has led me to consider the role of universities in all this. We are on the whole very subservient about copyright. We always go along with the rights holders, even if they want to charge exorbitant fees for content. But if we view this as one of the major struggles of modern society then shouldn't universities take the side of social justice? They should at least have a position that is more thought out than 'we do what they tell us'. It may be that they do agree with the current enforcement of copyright as a social and creative good. I'd disagree but at least they are taking a side. I would prefer to think that they take an informed role in promoting openness. This doesn't mean straightforward piracy, but rather the promotion of creativity, knowledge generation, and sharing. So, their ultimate response may be a rather nuanced one 'we support X, under these conditions, but not Y'.

But it may require them to be brave, and not be bullied by copyright lawyers, to take a moral, and social, stand on these issues. At the moment, I think most universities are still in the traditional mindset and they feel that their role is to exhibit the utmost caution in regard to copyright. But this is no longer a side issue and as reuse and copyright take centre stage, universities may need to rediscover some of their old backbone and calling for a noble cause. Make no mistake - this will be a real battle and those who want to maintain copyright as control will get vicious. Simply going along with them will have moral implications.

Slideshare is the best OER site?

I've been writing a paper recently (which will appear in the open access journal JIME soon), and one of the things I wanted to do was compare the traffic at educational resource sites, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and the OU's OpenLearn with a commercial web 2.0 offering, namely Slideshare. Will Woods pointed me at statsaholic, which in turn led me to register with Compete.com. From these I got this nice graph:

We can see Slideshare is way out in front. This raises several questions:

i) Are people more likely to share stuff through something like Slideshare?

ii) Is the basic unit of sharing (the presentation) at Slideshare, something people understand more than courses and units at OER sites?

iii) Is the comparison fair? Can we consider Slideshare an OER repository of sorts?

iv) Are commercial operations just better at this than educational ones?

v) Are people 'learning' from Slideshare? If so, how does it compare with learning from OERs?

I'm not suggesting OERs are a failure and Slideshare a success, I don't see this as an eithor/or debate, and they are serving different communities. But it is interesting to consider from the OER perspective. Isn't it? Got to be some research money in this somewhere...

What the Digital Britain report should have said

As most UK readers will be aware we have Lord Carter's Digital Britain report available which sets out the vision for the UK economy being one that embraces all things digital (after all, jam making aside, we've nothing else left). If you're not from the UK, don't worry, if you haven't got such a strategy already, you'll no doubt be getting one soon, as all countries see the potential of a digital economy to get us out of the hole we are currently in.

The report sets out some commendable aims, such as creating a digital infrastructure, ubiquitous broadband and all that. But where it comes unstuck is in stressing the importance of protecting copyright online and threatening to crack down on file-sharing. Admittedly they were never going to say 'forget copyright, we promote a free for all', but they seem to be limiting their view of the net to one of a consumer channel. Never mind that four out of the top ten websites in the world are based around people sharing and creating content (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Wikipedia).

Charles Leadbeater of We-Think fame has an excellent response, which I urge you to read. He sums it up when he says:

"plans to invest more in digital technologies will only pay off if they bring further disruption to economies that are already in turmoil"

And this is the key to the problem with the Digital Britain report. It is, at heart, a cowardly report. They have listened to the protectionist lobbying of the incumbent industries and sought to create a strategy that will serve their needs. Unfortunately, an internet used as a broadcast channel is a long-dead notion, so it will not serve the needs of a new economy. Their proposal to create a digital infrastructure while simultaneously enforcing more stringent copyright is rather like suggesting an investment in eco-friendly cars while listening to the petro-chemical companies and simultaneously slashing petrol prices.

Here is my alternative conclusion:

"It is obvious that success online is created by empowering users to become creators and sharers of content. We will seek to support this fundamental ethos. We appreciate that this does not directly correspond with the existing models of many media businesses and we will set out a support strategy to help these industries to migrate to new business models and working methods which embrace the possibilities of the digital age."

If you want to have your say, then Tony Hirst and Joss Winn have taken the report and chunked it down handily into paragraphs, which you can then comment on individually at WriteToReply. In other words they've done exactly what the report should be promoting, but seems a long way from understanding.

With friends like these, musicians don't need enemies

Nothing in this post is new, but I had a reminder of the idiocy of copyright today. I got a message from YouTube telling me my Edupunk video had been blocked because of a copyright claim. The account read:

"Your video, Edupunk, may have audio content from Anarchy In The U.K. by Sex Pistols that is owned or licensed by WMG."

Well, I can't argue, that is obviously true. But let's examine the logic of this and ask a few questions:

Question 1: "Is it likely that my use of Anarchy in the UK as the soundtrack to an ed tech video will damage sales? Will anyone who was going to buy it, now not do so, because they have my video?"
Answer: No, the opposite is probably true, someone may be reminded they don't have it and purchase it.

Question 2:  Am I, an individual likely to pay them for usage?
Answer: No, it's non-c0mmercial use, I am not going to be the type of licence fees set out for a commercial world.

Question 3: Are the artists harmed in any way?
Answer: Not as far as I can see. The use of the song to accompany the visuals surely creates something new, which they would never have intended. So, I am not stopping them from doing something they were likely to do.

Question 4: Am I profiting from this in any way?
Answer: No, not really unless being slagged off by Donald Clark counts (and in a way, it does).

Question 5: Isn't there something rather ironic in this song in particular being locked down this way?
Answer: Hell yes!

These questions (apart from no 5) seem like the type of ones artists and copyrighters should be asking in a digital age. Their preference though is to that no-one sees my video, even though, as I suggest above, the impact is at worst negligible and at best, positive to sales.

Oh well, there's always Blip.Tv.

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My 7 stage plan for the film industry

<Image Last Curtain is Falling by Alex//Berlin http://flickr.com/photos/15082599@N08/2710899029/>

Alan Parker, Kenneth Branagh and assorted British film people wrote an open letter to the Times warning that piracy is undermining the creative industries. On the radio yesterday I heard the producer of Quantum of Solace stating how in the far east they don't make any money on DVD sales because everyone watches illegal copies. He bemoaned all the promotion and distribution costs they have to bear.

Sigh. They still really don't get it do they? They have one model which they keep returning to, again and again. They're supposed to be creative, so get creative about your own industry. Interestingly, they put forward the opposite argument back in the 1980s when home video first came on the scene. Then the argument was that it would detract from cinema revenue and result in the collapse of the film industry. Then they realised that they could make as much, if not more, money from video rentals and sales and now they see it as some hallowed right to retain. Just as they were slow to understand the potential for home video so they are being slow to appreciate what the online world offers. Their only response to the internet at the moment is to think of it as another distribution medium - DVD online, for the same fee.

So, if any executives want to hire me on an expensive consultancy, here is my seven stage plan for what they should do.

1. Accept the inevitable, don't fight it. When content becomes digital it will be freely distributed online. It's not as if they haven't had enough advance warning from the music industry about this. So don't waste your energy in trying to invent ever more restrictive DRM (which some teenager will hack the following week), or more aggressive legislation (which alienates your audience and can never be fully effective), or putting political pressure on Governments (who understand the issue even less than you do). Instead put your effort into finding a workable solution in the new landscape.
2. Look at some of those costs. Distribution? Packaging? They're going to disappear. Marketing? Will need to be redirected. Actors? Well, maybe they are demanding $20million per picture because they know the profits you are making. If you're making less, they'll get less. A lot of your current costs are based on your current model - the model shouldn't exist just to justify these costs.
3. Be the iTunes of film. Develop a super- cool, massive bandwidth, good social interaction site with a huge database.
4. Make downloads or streaming cheap enough that some people will pay over downloading pirates eg. $1 a film. 
5. Use advertising. Make downloads free, but with some obligatory, can't be skipped adverts at the start.
6. Offer subscription service which gives extra functionality - commentaries, webcasts from the crew, sneak previews, invites to pre-screening, etc.
7. Make the cinema the experience - films still have the cinema as their main source of revenue. This is not a zero-sum game: A lot of people who download a film have either already seen it in the cinema, or wouldn't go and see it there anyway. Not every download is a cinema seat lost. Cinema going is still a social activity (what else would teenagers do on first dates?), and they should utilise this even more than they do currently.

Openness - catch my disease

Post title pinched from Ben Lee - Catch my disease

I'm in Barcelona for the last FLOSScom meeting and I'm presenting at the Free Knowledge Free Transfer conference. The talk I was going to give was about using open source approaches in education, but I've changed it to one on how openness can be seen as a virus, which higher education is catching.

The argument goes like this: once you start being open about content, it becomes contagious to all aspects of your life. There are different ways the open virus can spread, and some people are more 'resistant' to it than others. One highly infectious carrier is The Blog. Once you start blogging you need to create posts so that provides an incentive to share more ideas, often before they are fully massaged into a conventional publishable format. The blog further increases the rate of infection by acting as a central hub for reusable material. For example you may start embedding video clips, images, etc from other people as you blog about their work.

Then the next step is that you feel you should reciprocate. An urge to share and reuse are classic symptoms of someone with open disease. You start using Slideshare to upload all your Powerpoint files. You become more confident when you receive positive feedback and feel you can risk a slidecast. Then you want to embed video clips and dabble with Seesmic.

At the same time you play around with some social networks. A colleague holds you with a glittering eye and convinces you, nay forces you, to try Twitter. Despite some early reservations you are soon addicted, and tweet all manner of things. The open disease has now begun to infect your personal as well as professional life.

And then you need to write a paper, but instead of huddling away you decide to do it in the open, and create a wiki, which others contribute to. The paper goes in to a journal, but you are asked to sign a copyright form forbidding you from releasing the work yourself, and the journal is not freely available. This doesn't seem in the spirit with which you now live your life, and so you refuse, and go looking for an open journal.

You are now looking at your teaching load next year and thinking 'how can I make this more open?' Inspired by the likes of David Wiley, you create your course out in the open. Students come to your lectures, but you also upload these to the course blog and invite anyone to participate. You next eye the assessment and decide that a standard exam is no longer the best way to assess what students are doing and create a course repository where students are 'examined' by the contribution they make to the content for the next cohort.

Next you gain a research grant and are the Principle Investigator on a four-party research project. You figure that the open principles have served you well so far, so create a project wiki, invite others to rank the project's objectives, ask for feedback on the final report and make all the findings freely available.

Open disease now infects all aspects of your life. Congratulations, now spread to others.

The weirdness of copyright

I've written a chapter for a book with James Dalziel and we are asked to sign a copyright form. Now, I usually just sign these, but I've been getting fussy about this stuff recently. So, I actually read this one, and when you analyse it, there are a number of really draconian measures in there. If you look at it rationally you think 'no-one would invent a system like this now'. To be fair, they have said we can publish the chapter online if we ask permission, and this copyright form is fairly standard. But I think it's an interesting exercise to go through it.

"Author(s) agrees to, and does hereby assign all rights, title and interest, including copyrights, in and to the manuscript to Publisher. The author retains the rights to any intellectual property developed by the author and included in the manuscript including, without limitation, any models, theories, or conclusions formulated by the author. While the author may use any and all thoughts and research results developed or accumulated while working on a manuscript, and may rewrite, update, and re-title them for use in other publications, the author CANNOT use the verbatim text of the manuscript or any part thereof that has been copyrighted"

I love the 'author may use any thoughts' line - it's nice of them to let the author keep their thoughts I guess. But the key assumption we don't question here is that they own the chapter - you have written, edited, formatted it, but have surrendered all rights to it. This is particularly odd when you consider the next point:

"Author(s) understand that no royalties or remuneration will be paid by the Publisher to the author for the above named submitted manuscript. Further, Author(s) acknowledge the manuscript is being provided on a volunteer basis for the professional recognition obtained by the publication."

So, we do all the work, you keep all the money. Woohoo! Good job we like that professional recognition so much.

"The Author(s) will indemnify and defend Publisher against any claim, demand or recovery against Publisher by reason of any violation of any proprietary right or copyright, or because of any libelous or scandalous matter contained in the Manuscript."

And we have to carry all the risk as well.

"The Author(s) agrees that until the publication of the manuscript Author(s) will not agree to publish, or furnish to any other publisher, any work on the same subject that will infringe upon or adversely affect the sale of the manuscript. Furthermore, author(s) cannot post the contents of the article on any personal website or other sites, or distribute the work to others in either electronic or print forms."

I mean, seriously, come on. They have said that actually we can, as long as we seek permission. What I would like to know is if I put something online and it increases the sales of the book, do I get a cut then?

"Contributing authors will not receive complimentary copies of the handbook; however, publisher will provide contributors to the handbook with a copy of their published manuscript along with a copy of the cover page of the publication. In addition, Publisher will provide each contributor to the handbook a 40% discount offer if they decide to purchase the handbook."

I can buy a copy of my own work at reduced cost!

"The Publisher may permit others to publish, broadcast, make recordings or mechanical renditions, publish book club and micro-film editions, make translations, and other electronic versions, show by motion pictures or television, syndicate, quote, and otherwise utilize this work, and material based on this work."

Now, granted that Edtechie The Movie isn't coming to a cinema near you any time soon, but the control still resides with the publisher. As the author I would have no say in how it is later used. When you publish online you accept this to a degree, but at least a CC licence allows me to specify that it is share-alike, or non-commercial, so gives me some element of control.

Now compare this with, say, keeping a blog:

• I can still get the professional recognition,
• I still do the work, but I can style it and edit it the way I want
• If there were any money to be made, I would make it
• It potentially reaches a wider audience
• No-one will sue me if I put it in two places or reuse it
• It is free to the reader
• I own it

Hmm, wonder which one academia should choose...

Future of content vid with annotations

Accusations of flogging dead horses may well be justified, but just in case you thought my Future of Content was some randomly assembled clips, the annotated version is now up on YouTube (again you have to click through to see the annotations).

So, I've now done the article, made a video of it, then added textual annotation to explain the video. Erm, full circle anyone? Still, you do now have a choice of medium.

The eduWomble manifesto

For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you - eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment

"Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #'Womble Strategy"

For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children's television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it's the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor.

The main theme is represented in the lyrics by "Making good use of the things that we find/Things that the everyday folks leave behind." For the modern educational technologist this means using non-educational applications in educational settings. It also applies to content - as I argued in the YouTube annotations post, what commentary allows you to do is to take any resource and make it an educational one, and what digital content allows you to do is find and locate any resource. So an average photo becomes part of a digital storytelling class, a clip from a 50s TV series part of a commentary on changing architectural styles, a Sex Pistols track a theme tune for RSS, and so on. We're making good use of the things people leave behind.

A second theme is that of the loosely coupled nature of the educational technologist. Obviously this applies to our use of applications, but also our network. We all belong to different types of network (e.g. I sort of belong to networks such as 'The OU', 'The OU plus associated people', 'UK edubloggers', 'The Canadian/US eduglu affiliation', etc). These are bottom up, but still highly effective networks. Here the lyrics do the Clay Shirky by stating " Wombles are organized, work as a team."

Another theme is that of change management by stealth. Here the lyrics remind us that " People don't notice us, they never see/Under their noses a Womble may be." And furthermore that " We're so incredibly, utterly devious/Making the most of everything". This sounds like Injenuity in Viral Professional Development mode.

And just to reiterate the reuse, mashup agenda the lyrics end with " Pick up the pieces and make them into something new/Is what we do!". Surely written with Tony in mind?

Recently David Wiley asked if we should have something akin to a carbon footprint for education, which calculated how much you reused material. The status one should aspire to is eduWomble.

Here are the lyrics in full:

Underground, Overground, Wombling Free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
Things that the everyday folks leave behind.

Uncle Bulgaria,
He can remember the days when he wasn't behind The Times,
With his map of the World.
Pick up the papers and take them to Tobermory!

Wombles are organized, work as a team.
Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean.
Underground, Overground, wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we!

People don't notice us, they never see,
Under their noses a Womble may be.
We womble by night and we womble by day,
Looking for litter to trundle away.

We're so incredibly, utterly devious
Making the most of everything.
Even bottles and tins.
Pick up the pieces and make them into something new,
Is what we do!

The future of content - the eduVJ mix

Tony has posted a follow up to his original vid, so in the spirit of friendly competition, I'd best follow suit. I have taken my Future of Content post and done an eduVJ (as Patrick dubbed it) mix. I'm not sure it works as well as the first one, mainly because this is trying to make more of an academic point, so maybe the fit to the song isn't as neat.

I'm enjoying doing these though, and this one taught me some more about using Camtesia (such as save your file because it might crash out half way through). The last one was a Camtesia recording of Powerpoint, this one was all done in Camtesia. I hope you'll forgive this experimenting in public approach, it's a good way of learning.

Anyway, here it is, I'll do a YouTube annotated version later too, but this is the Blip.TV one: