Some Harvard professors are taking very seriously their “intellectual property rights” and have claimed copyright to the ideas that they spread in their classrooms. What prompted this was a website in which students posted their notes to help other students.
The professors have cracked down. It might have been enough to legislate against this behavior in particular. Instead, they wrapped their objection in the great fallacy of our age: the professor owns his ideas and they may not be spread without his permission.
This action has opened up a can of worms, and now other universities have taken up the puzzling question: how do you at once enforce intellectual property and uphold the ideal of a university, which is, after all, about teaching and spreading ideas to others?
The problem is a serious one that highlights the absurdity of the notion that an idea — infinitely reproducible and thereby not scarce, and also taught with the overt purpose of gaining adherents among students — can be somehow contained and restrained once it is unleashed. The only way to retain exclusive possession of an idea is never to share it with anyone.
[...]
Another approach is the one taken by Harvard and, most explicitly, by the University of Texas, which has suggested that professors make the following contract with students:My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. They are my own original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver them in order to secure protection. Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class thereby creating a derivative work from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other use. You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me.
You can make “no other use” of what you learn? Really? That sort of smashes the whole point of education, doesn’t it?1
- Jeffrey Tucker – If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others? [↩]
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Wo kämen wir da hin, wenn sich Wissen und Ideen einfach frei verbreiten dürften, ohne dass jemand daran verdient…
Ich sage nur: http://piraten-partei.ch/
Ach, die Piratenpartei. Es ist enttäuschend, dass sie nicht auch ein starkes Bankgeheimnis fordert und Netzneutralität würde die Eigentumsrechte der Internetprovider verletzen. Bezüglich Geistiges Eigentum sind sie zudem nicht konsequent. Aber ich schätze ihren Kampf gegen den Überwachungsstaat, für Parallelimporte, für Filesharing, für Videospiele etc.
Das gibt’s inzwischen auch in der Schweiz: “Die Urheberrechte für die Inhalte liegen bei den Professoren. Nur mit ihrer Einwilligung ist eine kommerzielle Nutzung zulässig”
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wirtschaft/unternehmen-und-konjunktur/Streit-um-Urheberrechte-Studenten-veraergern-Dozenten/story/22537626
Hab’s diesen Morgen auch gelesen. Und ich dachte, was die Dozenten an der Uni so erzählen, das sei allgemein bekanntes Wissen. Aber scheinbar ist es nun so, dass man Gebühren zahlen muss, wenn man Wissen benutzen will, das man nicht eigenständig erarbeitet hat.