My take on all the activity (proposed laws and regulations, new contracts)
around copyright and intellectual property rights is that it is just that, a
lot of activity. Commerce, education, government, (lots of raison d'etre for
lawyers), are all systems co-adapting with telecommunications and electronic
publishing; self-referencing copyright principles, as they have been applied,
with new forms of commerce and opportunities for accessing, re-organizing,
sharing and disseminating information. I don't think the system we are
accustomed to is necessarily fair or just, and the proposed new forms probably
won't be either, but they willl continue to to be argued and adjudicated, with
new forms emerging. That is what complex adaptive systems do....continually
self-reference and feedback onto themselves in terms of new situations, to
which they have contributed.
It is quite easy to put a Marxist or neo-Marxist spin on these activities.
What is interesting to me is that we academics, sensing that our familiar ways
of conduct are threatened, tend to deny or not bring to the fore, the frequent
abuse of students by faculty under the system we know best.
How many faculty and students know of others, or have personal experience with
their work being used by faculty as if it were their own? In my career as
student and faculty I have found many instances of such abuse, with schools
turning a blind eye. In fact, I have often thought it would be valuable for
universities, at least, to spend as much money and time on issues of faculty
plaigiarism of students' work as they do on issues of sexual harassment.
My point is that in these times we are continually challenged to look deeply
into our own praxis as educators, to attend to the power relations involved in
the teacher-student relationship, and to learn how to be genuine co-learners.
This challenge makes sense from a Marxist or neo-Marxist perspective, as much
as it does from a systems or complexity frame of reference.
It seems to me that some of the richest contributions of CHAT derive from its
focus on the dynamics of co-learning. Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Dewey, Mead, Piaget,
Freire; a diverse and rich powerful base for learning how to not waste a mind.
Molly Freeman
.
Eva Ekeblad wrote:
> At 00.15 +1100 98-12-10, Phil Graham wrote:
> >Thus,
> >ownership of each idea, by further separating the world of ideas into
> >proprietary fragments, becomes of proprietary interest.
>
> The absurdity...
>
> ... how about copyrighting the idea of connecting two clauses of a sentence
> with an "and"? I wonder how much one could charge per instance...
>
> I just cannot get my mind around this
> Eva