[FC-discuss] [FC-Discuss] Universities and free content

[Gavin Baker]

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Sorry I'm behind on this thread.

I would group the survey questions like this:

(1) Student copyright
(2) Campus network: p2p, Tor, data strangling, etc.
(3) Open access
(4) Class software: are students required to use non-free software?
incl. course management systems
(5) Lab software: are campus labs running FOSS?
(5) Open file formats (for college & class docs)
(6) Web standards (for college's Web sites)
(7) Library digitization projects: is the university digitizing its
public domain holdings, if they're not previously available online? Are
they doing it the good way (e.g. Open Content Alliance) or the bad way
(e.g. Microsoft)?
(8) OpenCourseWare: making course materials available
(9) Patent policy (maybe): do they file software patents, business
method patents? **
(10) Trademark policy (maybe): this is an emerging issue, but there was
some worrying talk about colleges trying to trademark their colors & sue
anyone who used them without permission...
(11) Privacy (maybe): what do they collect about you? how do they use it?
(12) Free speech (maybe): Free speech zones (is this our core
competency?)? Other issues?
(13) Copyright "education": RIAA et al. misinformation programs?
(14) Freedom of information (maybe): Can you get public records?
(15) Others?

This is a good idea. It's a good way to talk about our values, to
articulate a positive vision for the university, to provide concrete
goals for students and policy suggestions for universities. "Hit List"
isn't the greatest name, but we can work on that. ("Free Culture U."?)

As a note, it will take some effort to get this information. At a
minimum, you're probably looking at the IT office, the library, the
tech. transfer office, and general counsel. But it's important, and this
is a great project.

My platform from my campaign for Student Senate may be useful*:
http://www.gavinbaker.com/sg/why/

* FYI, I got decent press coverage of my platform (Boing Boing,
Slashdot) and was elected. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to accomplish
most of it in only one year! That's politics...

** Universities Allied for Essential Medicines has a platform for
university medical patent licensing, [1]. At their conference this
weekend, there was some talk of doing a similar survey of universities
to rate their policies. FWIW FreeCulture.org is a signatory to this
statement.

[1] http://consensus.essentialmedicine.org/

Dmcdevit wrote:
> Fred Benenson wrote:
>> The whole point should be to encourage people who don't have a chapter 
>> to go discover these facts.
>>
>> We should absolutely not make it a requisite that you have to have a 
>> chapter, or even an interest in starting one, in order to help us.
>>
>> FYI NYU's policy is pretty good -- they're really cagey about giving 
>> out privacy information to non-supoenaing parties, and they let 
>> students own their work and release it under CC / GPL / whatever.
>>
>> I've also have had meetings with the Dean of Libraries and other big 
>> people at NYU and they tend to be pretty accepting about Open Access 
>> though not necessarily pro-active.
>>
>> But their p2p policy is pretty stupid, they have plenty of 
>> double-speak in it. Anyway, maybe I'll create an entry in here for it.
>>
>> But I'd really like a chart -- does anyone want to make one? With nice 
>> Red / Green backgrounds?
>>
>> F
> This is interesting. I'll have to take some more time to look into 
> Reed's policies, but my sense is that we are not one of the bad ones. 
> I've taken a stab at table-ifying the ranking, if that's what you were 
> looking for. <http://wiki.freeculture.org/Hit_List#The_Hit_List> Feel 
> free to completely redo it if you have something else in mind.
> 
> Dominic
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at freeculture.org
> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss

- --
Gavin Baker
Students for Free Culture
http://freeculture.org/
gavin at freeculture.org

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