Posts filed under 'Media law'
With six ISP’s signed up to a UK Government drive to stamp out illegal music downloads everyone is looking for the next big thing in legitimate file-sharing. I met the Grooveshark team earlier in the year when they were in beta. They had a plan to entice users by giving them a share of profits. If you upload music to Grooveshark and someone buys the track, you get a cut (probably tiny but gift horse, mouth). P2P advertising that keeps the publishers happy.
CNET have said:
In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other’s fins for dominance, there’s at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark.
Free streaming. Social networking. Music discovery. Oh, and reimbursement for sharing when somebody buys a song that you’ve uploaded to the collective.
And Wired magazine wrote:
If you’re looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you’re depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help.
Publishers who own the third party material on OpenLearn have suggested we do a similar thing. If they could find out more about who is interested in their materials and see some resulting sales, they might make more of their materials freely available on OpenLearn.
August 4th, 2008
UNISUL – a university in Brazil – have translated the OpenLearn study unit Information on the Web into a Portuguese study unit. Big thanks to them for showing the power of using a Creative Commons license to publish educational resources freely. There’s been a massive increase in demand for distance learning in Brazil (as we reported in April 2007 when we signed a research partnership with UNIDERP in Brazil) so hopefully OER can go some way towards meeting the need for access to education as the economy of the country grows.
June 20th, 2008
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation who have supported OpenLearn, recently sponsored a day long Arts Intensive workshop around how “digital media makers are are pushing the boundaries of collaboration and copyright”. The videos from the day can be found here and have interesting sounding titles such as “From creativity to waste”, “Darwin, Web 2.0 and the role of the amateur” and “Distinct cultures and and mass products”. Speakers included Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine, Gordon Knox of Stanford Humanities Lab and Cathy Casserly of Hewlett.
It looked like a great day. Some of the questions they focussed on were:
* Are we experiencing a new social phenomenon generated by Web tools or is the Web a reflection of our human (im)possibilities?
* Are we living in a culture in which “amateurs” can contribute to knowledge as did Darwin?
* Are Open Education Resources changing the role of the expert?
* How do we define place in a globalized age of connectivity?
* How do distinct cultures and mass products co-exist? How does one discern the organic and effective scale of a project or an organization?
* And, what will we see in Web 3.0?
Session Objectives
1. Recognize what digital culture means for how people create, interpret, and communicate on-line and on the ground, and how this culture is reshaping how we understand scale, access, choice, and participation.
2. Learn how co-creation and digital platforms are eroding the boundary between amateurs and experts – dispersing the walls that bound institutional knowledge.
3. Understand the different forces affecting the digital cultural landscape now and to come.
4. Gain awareness of how our communities can deal responsibly with e-waste as we embrace digital culture.
May 15th, 2008
A bit late commenting on this one I know, but important to note given our own Creative Commons licensing and past struggles to include OpenLearn in Wikipedia. In December the Wikimedia Foundation did a deal with CC so that the community can relicense the content in their wikis under a BY-SA license. So this means people can now legally mix Wikipedia and Creative Commons license materials. Thanks to Jamendo Blog for explanation – there’s a lot of confusion out there! Maybe we’ll start seeing Wikipedia being used to extend the reach of open educational resources and a new working relationship with Wikiversity.
January 10th, 2008
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I’m a big fan of personalised radio website and music genome project Pandora. I’ve just received an email from Pandora founder Tim Westergren to say they have to shut the UK service down as they haven’t been able to negotiate an affordable licence fee for Internet radio streaming here. In the US they are also fighting increases in web royalty rates which might shut them down. Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.
Tim writes: “It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don’t often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent – and by that I mean both well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling… Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I’m very, very sorry.”
Tim, me too. 
More on the Pandora blog.
January 9th, 2008
(blogging from OpenLearn rights holders workshop)
Research group:
They didn’t talk about research! (No one ever does talk about the topic suggested in a brainstorm!)
Requirements from the side of publishers are vague. They need a definition about what is the OpenLearn arena. They are happy to let the users learn in this environment but as the rightsholders to the content they are concerned about where it goes after that. How are we going to protect this content for the publishers? They want this to be a long-term project and they will reduce rates for this but publishers are giving us more for less. They need to understand the benefits for the content provider. The session turned into a Dragons Den with Patrick making a case for open content to the publishers who wanted projections on their ROI. How sure are we that people will still pay to study with open content available? We need to work as a partnership where both sides benefit.
Collaboration group
Content providers have to represent authors and professional bodies and we have a duty to protect the rights of the original content provider even if we are the rights holders. Wiley and Blackwell provide some things free – abstracts, one chapter of a book, some journals – in order to attract people to use the paid for content. We might need to talk about degrees of freedom for content. We could write open content courses around text books to encourage sales to extend reading list concept. Users would be sent to to the textbook to fill gaps in the course. Recognised industry is changing and it is difficult to know what quality assurance means and who the ‘assurers’ are. Wikipedia is a useful resource despite its open model.
Q: Noted that it is difficult to clear textbooks because of the variety of assets with individual rights agreements that need negotiating.
Q: Question was asked – what are you scared of? The answer is losing money. We have to read a middle ground as publishers are willing to work with us, but they are not in businesses that are driven by social responsibility. Partnerships are required. Publishers need to understand where the boundaries of use are within OpenLearn, they are happy for it to be used by OpenLearn but not reused as it opens up many complications and business risks. OpenLearn does allow publishers to experiment with an open model without too much risk. Publishers need a clearer definition of who the user is – the ages, professions etc.
Comment: Print publishing is highly territorial
Q: When does it not become OpenLearn? Can we have a tiered approach where people can get some content for free and some they are driven to register for or buy?
Social networking group
Potential for publishers to reuse OpenLearn content.
The book as a physical object is robust. People don’t like to read from the screen.
Will users want to extend use IPods etc for education as well as leisure.
How do we mange traffic through to publishers websites?
Social/Corporate group
How we can better understand rights holders issues.
Guardian have concerns because they need to protect the rights of 5000 freelancers. There is a public perception that if content is online it is free to reuse.
We can report statistics back to publishers on how the content is used – eg key terms people are searching on to find the content.
The author still has rights to approve what is done with the content so it can’t be open to reuse anywhere without their permission.
The arts textbooks always have third party materials negotiated for one time use.
We aren’t always the decision makers. Perhaps there needs to be a working group working with the Publishers Association.
If we could prove this can drive sales it would help – links through to books on Amazon tracked.
Need to standardise the language of the grant to help rights departments manage resource.
If we make the content free, people who would pay the rights holders to access the materials will just come to OpenLearn and they will lose business.
If the rights holders is served a deletion notice, they cannot fulfil their legal responsibility if they don’t know where the content has been reused.
Comment: Other free services offer a hook to the publishers to make money and we need to offer that.
Comment: Even where provider has same social mission like a museum, they have to protect the context as much as the content.
Comment: We should talk to content aggregators, eg Books27, who have experience in this area to see how publishers can make money from every reuse.
Ian Jacobs: No such thing as a content provider, we are all very different and our constraints are different. Some publishers have a lot of free content so extending their reach with that content is a good offer. It is useful to see our content in use, usage statistics are helpful to identifying business opportunities. Playing with the site alone gives you plenty of ideas about how this could provide opportunities but we need some facts to start investigating. We rarely have the rights to our content. For a niche publisher the best benefit would be reach to a niche audience eg archeology if OpenLearn becomes a magnet for that niche audience.
Jonathan Crowe: Currently looking at e-books and interfaces for a lot of text-based content.
Q: Digital downloadable audio is now becoming a large market. Has anyone started working in this?
December 3rd, 2007
(blogging from OpenLearn rights holders workshop)
Notes on Dr Patrick McAndrew’s presentation
Sticks – assignment deadlines, examinations, tutors who call
Carrots – qualifications, progression, peer approval
OpenLearn offers no sticks, and there are questions about what are the carrots.
Athabasca in Canada are offering exams to people, where they just pay a small amount to get the qualification, rather than a lot to study the course.
Reasons for study include professional development, interest, hobby, job progress, job change and study. Results from an early survey. We have some serious learners.
Tag cloud gives us some information on how people classify our content and what they use it for. How do you find out about people who won’t tell you anything? An issue in the open content world where learners can be anonmyous and unknown to the institution.
People like free, they like to learn.
Users see OpenLearn as content and tasters.
We start from a formal learning experience – content from our courses. We even labelled all our courses by OU course codes, which we find OpenLearners as well as our OU students using.
Only 214 occurances of the word fun in relation to OpenLearn in Google!
We found one person in the middle of the Atlantic working as a Government official who came to our attention because he was printing off all our materials.
Patrick tells ‘Anne’s story’ shown in a Compendium knowledge map. An OpenLearner living in Spain, learning Spanish, using Compendium to help her map ideas for writing a novel, she is studying with Madrid university, aims to do a course when she can afford it.
Our starting point was leaking information to the world. We started providing XML – useful for technical producers but not a great gift to educators who often work in Word. We were very excited to see one person editing in XML until we realised it was our Technical Director proving it worked!
We now provide the content in a variety of formats. We have seen people translate the materials without any contact with us. We are using RSS feeds and widgets to extend the reach of our content and anable it to be easily published elsewhere.
Patrick shows animoto. Patrick gave it access to materials from OpenLearn and the website allowed him to create a montage.
Looking at the future: disaggregation of content, support, awards and users. Open the door to everyone even if you don’t quite know what to do with them!
November 29th, 2007
(blogging from OpenLearn rights holders workshop)
Notes from presentation by Richard McCracken
Are you mad?
Our content is valuable – why are we giving it away, possibly to our competitors?Will the content other rework be as valuable as our original material given we have so much expertise in the area of creating content for distance education?
Death by a thousand cuts
Or what?
Open is an idea whose time has come. Better to be part of it, discover and explore it from the inside.
Creating a buzz, attracting new students, better preparing students to study at a distance.
Good remixing will swamp the bad.
We will get market intelligence on what is in demand.
We need a simple broad license.
Characteristics of open license
Broad grant of license
Not subject to individual negotiation
Standardised terms
Non-commercial/educational/commercial
Based on collaboration and interchange
Moral rights are difficult to manage
Licensing issues
ownership of content in house
moral rights – we asked people to volunteer content
Retain third party content – it makes our content distinct to what other universities offer
What is non-commercial? Competitive? Cost recovery for evening classes allowed.
Collaboration among rights holders to explore potential
Creation and publication of content by users – managing defamation, obscenity etc
Why choose CC?
Standard within open content communities
mark of commitment
easily understandable
assessment of the business models
So mad or what?
November 29th, 2007
(blogging from the OpenLearn rights holders workshop)
Notes from presentation by Jerard Bretts, Programme Manager
How OpenLearn fits with the OU mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. Our vice-chancellor has stated how the philosophy is in line with the founding principles of The Open University.
Our goals are to advance open content delivery by providing learning tools, enabling learning communities to form and to research this activity.
Moodle is being used for OpenLearn as it is for our registered students.
We aim to have 5400 learning hours in the LearningSpace by April 2008 taken from current courses, and 8100 hours in the LabSpace which includes archived materials.
Lawrence Lessig and Bill Rammell spoke at our launch.
We’ve won and been nominated for a number of awards.
Jerard then shows a picture of our funders and a pile of cash to illustrate our success in attracting funding!
Over 310 study units
449 audio-visual assets
16,000 MSG instant messaging users
over 900 FlashMeeting booked
Introduced new e-production methods
Largest Moodle developer group in the world
Constant innovation – RSS, MyOpenLearn, download formats
Over 1 million unique visitors
Over 20K new visitors a week
34K registered users
Over 3000 registrations on OU courses from OpenLearn
Users from over 160 countries
20K signed up to our newsletter
Translations in portuguese, catalan, spanish
Jerard tells how the New Zealand Cricket Players Association and Bradford College in the UK are using OpenLearn as just two examples of outreach work
34 skills units
Demand for mirror sites being met
Research agreement with Brazilian university
Over 50 research outputs, over 1000 downloads of research papers
Received over 5000 emails from users
5 newly funded research projects funded drawing upon availability of OpenLearn
New partnerships and alliances formed
November 29th, 2007
There is buzz from the foyer where everyone attending today’s right holders workshop is chatting over tea. We’ve invited many of the publishers with whom we co-author content for our courses or from whom we license content. The idea is to share our experience with them now we’ve been running over a year, address any concerns and give the facts of what the impact has been so far of releasing our content under a Creative Commons license. We have people here from the Bridgeman Art Library, Getty Images, Hodder Education, John Wiley & Sons, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, Random House Archive and Library, Science Photo Library, Taylor and Francis, Thames& Hudson and Wiley-Blackwell (pheww!).
Jerard Bretts, OpenLearn’s Programme Manager will start off talking about the impact of OpenLearn, followed up by Richard McCracken, Head of Intellectual Property at the OU talking about the issues and challenges we’ve faced. Dr Patrick McAndrew will talk about how users are interacting with OpenLearn and then we are going into ‘hands-on’ sessions looking at the website and how we can build on how we work with publishers. We’ll all feedback after lunch and then our discussants, Jonathan Crowe from the Oxford University Press and Ian Jacobs from Thames & Hudson, will sum it all up beautifully.
Oooh… it’’s kicking off.
November 29th, 2007
Previous Posts
