The Wordl version of my CV summary

JISC Legal's newsletter reports on a domain name dispute resolution:

The dispute resolution panel of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has concluded that a domain name, ‘volvospares.com’, can be retained by a seller because of a legitimate interest in its bona fide use and unlikely confusion with the official Volvo website. There was no requirement for the seller to be the trade mark holder, or have permission from the holder, to own a domain name related to the mark. This ruling serves as a reminder to institutions to ensure all relevant domain names are registered to prevent similar disputes arising.

I'm not at all sure that businesses ought to be registering "all relevant domains". In this case it is perfectly reasonable for business to register a name that reflects what they do, i.e. deal in spares for Volvo. By the same reasoning should Volvo register 'secondhandvolvos.org'.

Domain names are really like personalised car number plates: completely irrelevant. Search engines will find your business and customers are unlikely to be deceived by a URL.

Beer company Heineken has offered an unusual defence against copyright infringement on the grounds that its use of copyright photographs on a web site was only temporary.

The company had set up a web site (HeinekenMusic.ie) to promote the Oxegen music festival in Ireland. The site aggregated content from a number of social networking sites such as Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr, LastFM, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook. The T&C stated that if anyone felt their rights had been infringed they should take up the matter with the third party, ie Flickr, YouTube etc.

The Australian union for journalists and photographers, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), complained and Heineken offer to pay 15 Euros per picture, claiming that

...any use of the images was, at best (if it could be said to be use at all, given they were immediately removed), use on a temporary basis and would not form the basis of any copyright claim in this jurisdiction.

While a notice and takedown policy is useful in a defence against infringement it is unusual to assert that temporary use is not an infringement. The sum offered is very low but Heineken claim that it is offered as compensation for 'having to write to us" and that 'no breach of copyright has occurred".

Source: Sunday Business Post 16 Nov 08

More discussion on http://www.copyrightaction.com/forum/heinekenmusic-ie-blames-your-content-host-for-letting-them-breach-your-copyright

Another tick in the box for Wikipedia aficionados.

According to a review in Information World Review (June 2008)- not available online (boo) - the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology compares unfavourably with Wikipedia as an undergraduate resource. The reviewer - Kim Thomas, a sociology PhD - thought the Blackwell offering suffered from partiality, impenetrability and a US-bias. Wikidpedia she found more useful, especially on UK coverage. The Blackwell offering, for example, has no entry for Michael Young, whom everyone should remember as the founder of the Open University and co-author of the seminal ‘Family and Kinship in East London’.

So one up for the Big Doubleyou.

Someone at the JISC EC SIG meeting on 27 May asked about the legal basis for the employer owning copyright in works created by employees in the course of their employment.

The relevant paragraph of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 is 11(2)

Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.

See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880048_en_2#pt1-ch1-pb3-l1g9

An 'agreement to the contrary' could be a contract of employment.

Open Content was the topic of the JISC/CETIS Educational Content SIG meeting on 27 May in Manchester http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/ECSIG_May08_meeting.

On the question of openness Cormac Lawler - talking about about Wikiversity - offered his preference for the French word Libre which conveys more a of feeling of liberty, i.e. freedom to do what you like with the resources. Interestingly, commercial uses are included within that freedom. The three parts of Wikiversity are: Learning Materials; Learning Activities; and Learning Communities

John Casey, explaining JORUM's plans to go open, reminded us about the highly risk averse culture in HE, the result of which is a complicated licence regime with high transaction costs. The aversion to the risk of IPR infringement seem curious comparison to much higher risk activities such building programmes and IT projects.

Roy Attwood, Bolton University, stressed that a notice and takedown poicy was a good defence against copyright legal action: in 12 years he only twice had to invoke this policy.

Turning to the question of the value of Learning Objects, Casey cited Cicero ‘my reputation is my wealth'. The often cited belief that content had commercial value is ill-founded and many in HE grossly over-rate the commercial value of content. This reminded me of Cory Doctorow's assertion that for authors, obscurity is bigger threat than piracy.

Part of understanding value is to learn more about how objects are used and by whom. JORUM recognised the need for repositories to generate detailed usage statistics, which would require better repository software functionality.

Concentrating on technical issues is, according to Casey, a displacement activity. We should be looking more at communities, shared spaces, collaboration.

Liam Earney - CASPAR (Copyright and Support Project for Electronic Resources) - noted that the time allocated for rights clearance was almost always seriously underestimated and took place at the wrong end the project (the end rather than the beginning) and that many people lack confidence in their own rights clearance abilities – don’t understand the jargon and don’t know what rights to ask for. This points to need for machine readable licences. IMHO rights clearance often is rather haphazard even in companies which recognise the need for this work - this is one of the reasons few companies can develop rights management software - practices are just so variable between companies.

Phil Barker reckoned that one hour of interactive content required anything between 40 and 400 hours of development time. Which suggests that 'quality' content is unlikely to created 'on the fly' as part of the everyday job. In a brave attempt to explain the basics of quantum physics, Phil compared an interactive simulation with a page of equations explaining the same phenomenon. The first example exploited the computer for computation; the second simply used the computer for delivery

All this stimulated a debate on quality and utility. Does everything have to be top of the range simulation type stuff? Might there be contexts in which a flat page of equations might be more appropriate than an interactive LO? Another aspect of quality is accessibility: if repositories are open for contributions, how doyou ensure accessibility standards are met?

Other issues that surfced were currency and findability. Repositories might learn from dating agencies: put you most attractive offerings on the front page to lure in the clients. Flickr's ranking by 'interestingness' was relevant here. Findability was hindered by metadata quality - it was suggested that a well crafted sentence was vital.

John Casey reckoned that concentrating on technical issues was displacement activity: the priorities for repositories were community building, collaboration, shared spaces etc.

A survey found that most people would reveal their passwords in return for a chocolate bar.
more