Student as Sharecropper?

Do the intellectual property rights to student work produced in the normal activities of a regular course belong to the student or to the University in which the student is enrolled? Should taking (and paying for) a college course be considered a "work for hire" arrangement? Well, if a student is taking certain courses at UH-Manoa's Academy for Creative Media, that student is required to assign all copyright of her work produced in the course to the ACM.

This unsavory (unjust?) policy is currently being challenged by a student in our program, who is waiting for a response from the ACM. The ACM's tactics and attitude toward this issue have so far been very disappointing. We have been researching the legalities of the policy and are honored that our cause is being supported by eminent IP legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. See his recent post: On teaching artists rights

See also a movement by USC students to change their similar policy here.

We hope the ACM will reconsider the more draconian and excessive terms of its agreement, especially the requirement for students to sign away their rights or be dropped from the course. This is a misguided policy and a disturbing precedent that undermines the ideal of fostering an environment of free exchange of knowledge--if that notion has (or ever had) any meaning in higher education.

Stay tuned...


---Jake Dunagan

The Prescience of HI 2000

Writer William Gibson has been much in the news lately, promoting his latest novel Spook Country.

As colleague Stuart Candy notes: It appears the Gibson is already here but he's just not evenly distributed. However, judging by the number of interviews and promotional appearances, he's almost there.

Gibson has been highly praised for his forecasts of the development of cyberspace and an internet society. Jim Dator writes on Gibson's approach and notes a stunningly accurate forecast of a ubiquitous cyber-society from Hawaii 2000.

Dator:

In the August issue of Discover Magazine, pp. 68f, there is an interview with William Gibson in which he is asked how came up with the ideas about cyberspace that made him and the concept famous in his novel, Neuromancer published in 1984. The interviewer says that "Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace' and described the Internet and virtual reality long before they were part of the cultural landscape."

In his replies, Gibson says that his ability to forecast so accurately then was due to his ignorance of the details of the things he was forecasting. "For instance," he says, "I remember the first time I saw a picture of a personal computer of any kind. It was sort of portable-looking, and it had a little handle. I knew that everybody would have one of those, and from that, knowing nothing about the technology and all the things they would have to overcome to get there, I just took it for granted that everybody's machine would be connected with everybody else's, and that they'd by typing to one another, or whatever it was they did. In that regard, I guess I got it right, but I think I got it right because of the profundity of my ignorance." He goes on to say the experts with their "Radio Shack computers" said there would never be enough bandwidth for such connectivity, and that he had no idea what "bandwidth" was.

This of course is an excellent example of what you all know--that futurists must be generalists who sometimes can "see" things specialists can not, and that they must expect to be ridiculed by the experts for their stupidity and arrogance. "Dator's Second Law", in other words.

Of course, sometimes they will be stupid and maybe arrogant, but if they are good at identifying and then connecting barely-visible dots, they should often see patterns that others may not.

However, it is worthwhile to remember that in fact Terence Rogers and/or other members of the Task Force on Science and Technology for the "Hawaii 2000" activities of 1969 and 1970 DID forecast the emergence of the Internet pretty well, though we in Hawaii then failed to take advantage of their foresight, which is another, quite serious, matter.

The Task Force Report said, in discussing "Electronics":

"Small size and small power requirements will also lead to extremely flexible personal communications, with pocket radiotelephones linked to the regular telephone system only a very few years away. We predict that improved equipment and simpler techniques for computer information storage and retrieval will lead to generations of personalized, potentially pocket-sized computers. Through these, the individual citizen will have instant access to vast stores of information. It is already clear that the source of power in the world of today and the future is largely through access to information, as it was once through control of land, and then of raw material supplies and manufacturing facilities. Accordingly, we can expect the government (and other groups) to endeavor to limit access to some kinds of information, and we will see many constitutional battles fought over principles we can only dimly perceive at this time. Related to this is the vast problem of secret electronic surveillance of our citizens--good or bad. Devices already commonplace in 1970 make it possible to bug anyone almost anywhere, and the scale and sophistication of surveillance described in Orwell's 1984 can already be regarded as underestimated for that date."

From the "Task Force Report on Science and Technology 2000", by Terence Rogers, in Hawaii 2000, edited by George Chaplin and Glenn Paige. University of Hawaii Press, 1973, p. 257f.

Gibson has raised several issues of importance for futurists in his recent interviews. We will address more of these in coming posts.