In an earlier post Kelley was pondering the problems of an education institution appropriating course materials including lectures and lecture notes, and claiming copyrights to that material--which could then be re-packaged and sold for profit by the institution.
In my opinion this raises a much more general question and a much more pervasive problem. Virtually all intellectual and creative materials are under similar threat from a variety of corporate and capitalist institutions. The ultimate objective is to commodify knowledge in all its forms, exploit the entire intelligencia and transform their knowledge and skills into sellable products. A key means to that appropriation is the use of copyrights and patents and other legal concepts which essentially construct such non-material entities into property, which can therefore be owned and exchanged through the usual capitalist infrastructure.
Since it is unlikely or impossible at this point to stop this process of appropriation, exploitation and commodification, there has to be developed various means to combat this phenomenon. The only method I can think of at the moment (barring the overthrow of capitalism) is to systematically construct a third position between the concept of either 'I own it" or "you own it". The idea is to creat in legal terms the concept that 'we own it'.
To that end the best direction I have run across is the copyleft movement in software (see quote from http://www.gnu.org/ below).
I am not at all sure that many people understand or realize just how much intellectual material is threatened by the assumed standards of copyrights and patents. Probably the most obnoxious example I can think of at the moment is a standard form used in the bio-medical establishment that grants to either an institution or corporation, the patent rights to your DNA and cell lines--this presumably extends to your reproductive cells--which means essentially you don't own your progeny, if you are cloned!
In any case you get the idea. I liked to hear ways to develop the idea of a form of copyleft that could be used in almost all circumstances in which either your intellectual and creative work was threatened, or in fact your own body. I don't think the GNU model is quite sufficient in that it subtly defauts into a collective ownership because it removes only the liklihood that some subsequent possessor can invent a method to control the distribution sufficiently to profit from it. Rather than a default, I'd like to see something more concrete, but I can not quite figure out a better method--at least in terms of copy and distribution.
I read the famous Halloween memos (tremendous thanks to Les Shafter for fwd that address) and these got me to thinking about a larger class of materials than just software.
Chuck Grimes
---------excerpt from GNU Project----------------------
The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.
In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have freedom. So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we ``copyleft'' it. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.