Chuck Grimes might know more about this because I recall that he raised this issue on another list some time ago. Somthing happening in Cali if I remember correctly. This move to ensure that our work as employees is somehow the uni's intellectual property really bugs me. It's happening in several places as I understand it. It is often connected to the increase in interest over the use of the web for teaching. --------------
Apologies, I've been lost in cyberwars with the evil Borg, chasing down what Linux, FreeBSD, and other unix groups had to say about the Halloween memo.
The basic trip is a move by universities and colleges to get explicit copyrights on course materials and lecture notes--then contract these materials out to be developed for canned liberal arts courses run by adjuncts and conducted through the web from cyberspace. My guess is you (the student) register, buy the manual and cd, play the cd, login for specific questions, and taking tests, handing in essays and so forth.
There is supposed to be something called the Western States Consortium that put together a plan to do this for several western states colleges. There is also something called The University of Phoenix, in Arizona that is actually a cyberU doing this sort of thing.
Most of this information, sketchy and probably wrong, comes from about two years ago from the Classics List--Univ. of Washington. There is a guy at UPenn who puts up all the interesting background material and suggested readings for his Classics courses up on a web site, along with the sylabus, and is very knowledgable about all this stuff--he supports a sort of edutainment add-on to regular academic work, but he also knows a lot about this copyright controversy. The other people to check out ( Classics list) are Judith Hallet(?) and Dan Tompkins. They both seemed to know a fair amount. DanT was more supportive, but sceptical, JHallet more opposed and had done battle with various rightwing students.
>From a rumor mill I got the idea that San Francisco State was trying
to get some profs to tape their lectures and presentations and then
sign off copyrights to these tapes. SFSU then was supposed to trade
these tapes and other education material for some deal to have their
computer systems and classroom systems upgraded by some big
corporation--maybe Microsoft, maybe Sun. I can remember, and have lost
track of that controversy.
My own confrontation with this business was much lower key and much less threatening. I was taping histories with a library project and had to sign something about the copyright. I couldn't figure out all the implications, so I just kept the copyright and handed over distribution rights for academic purposes.
The other possibility is to check out the GNU computer software license design and figure out if that is an alternative that can be negociated. The idea is if you are under pressure to sign off on job related materials, maybe following the 'Copyleft' trip might work--work to keep the materials licensed and under somekind of legal control, while giving up nothing of importance to you personally AND simultaneously making it very difficult for somebody else to turn a buck on your work. That is something that somebody with a lot more background than me, would have to figure out.
Anyway, I gotta go. Post something on what you find or think about all this.
Chuck Grimes
--JAA13580.910458072/shell.tsoft.com--
PS. I sent this, this morning just before work and when I got home, I found it bounced because I fouled up the address. I'll send something later on tonight. This copyright business has a lot of implications.