Fair Use Protection For Learning Should Be Applauded, But Not Limited To Universities

from the good-news dept

Following the recent pro-fair use rulings concerning Georgia State's e-reserves and book scanning efforts by a bunch of colleges and universities in the HathiTrust case, Siva Vaidhyanathan has a good article pointing out that these two rulings recognize that universities are "vast copy machines" and that's a very good thing.

...these cases strengthen the claim that universities and their libraries have a special place in copyright law because they have a special place in society. Courts and even Congress have long acknowledged the essential role of copying in the educational process. That’s why the preamble to the section of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act that outlines “fair use” specifies “teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” as examples of “fair uses”—uses that, although they involve the copying of protected material, are considered noninfringing because they enable essential public goods.

Universities are not copyright-free zones—far from it. But they do perform special services that often demand flexibility and liberties that enable them to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” the core mission of copyright as declared by the U.S. Constitution.

I actually think that Siva underplays the importance of learning in copyright -- as that was its original intent. The Constitutional clause concerning copyright talks about "promoting the progress of science" -- which at the time it was written meant "learning," and the very first Copyright Act in the US was actually entitled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning."

That said, I'm a bit disappointed that Siva then takes that storyline even further to suggest that universities deserve special protections against copyright enforcement that should not apply elsewhere. For example, he insists that while the HathiTrust ruling finds fair use for universities in scanning books (even if the scanning is done by Google) it should not apply to Google scanning books itself:

In any event, we are never going to see that operatic courtroom showdown between Google and publishing industry over whether the sweeping scanning of millions of books for explicitly commercial purposes constitutes a fair use by Google. I have written many times over the years that I am dubious of the strength of Google’s argument, and nothing in either the settlement news or the HathiTrust case has undermined my conclusion.

... Google is not a library. It is not a university. It is not a public service. It is a business. Too often we forget those distinctions. The project of creating, maintaining, and offering vast collections of digital material should be something that universities and libraries control, not something we depend on one company to handle.

I have long argued exactly the opposite, that Google's book scanning project should absolutely be seen as fair use as well. The use is clearly transformative and most of the evidence suggests it increases, rather than harms, sales. But, more importantly, it really is creating a tremendous library index that will help people find information and learn. I think Siva is going way too far in suggesting that universities should get special treatment. People learn from all sorts of places, not just universities. And we shouldn't carve out special rules for universities that, by default, harm those who do not attend or cannot afford to attend those universities. Part of the wonder of something like Google's book scanning project (and other similar projects, such as the one by the Internet Archive) is that it helps make these works accessible to all -- and we should be encouraging that for the sake of learning across the board, rather than just for a few institutions.

Filed Under: copyright, education, fair use, learning

California To Commission 50 Open Textbooks For 2013; Finnish Teachers Write One In A Weekend

from the just-can't-wait dept

Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major initiative in the US:

California college students hit with tuition increases in recent years will get a little financial help after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to create a website on which popular textbooks can be downloaded for free.

Twin bills by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) will give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks for lower-division courses offered by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems. Hard copies of the texts would cost $20.

The bill establishes a new California Open Education Resources Council, which will be required to choose the 50 core textbooks and then:

to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks

which would be released under a cc-by license. The move is likely to be significant nationally, as an article in The Textbook Guru points out:

The ripple effect of this legislation should spread way past California and throughout the whole country. With quality publisher-grade peer-reviewed options becoming newly available in open format and competing against the high-priced publishers' textbooks, faculty will need to pause to review these and see how they can be used in their classroom.

After all, if high-quality textbooks are freely available in digital form -- or hence for low prices as printed copies -- hard-pressed universities elsewhere in the US (and internationally) would be crazy not to consider them. The cc-by license means that the text can be freely modified for local needs as necessary, or translated.

As the above indicates, those 50 titles won't be ready until next year. Meanwhile, in Finland, some teachers decided to produce something a little sooner:

A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening.

You can find the book's LaTeX source code in a repository on Github: it's under the same cc-by license as the California books, so you can adapt it freely -- if you can read Finnish....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: california, creative commons, education, finland, learning, open textbooks, sharing, textbooks

Hachette Hits Libraries With 220% Price Increase On Its Ebooks

from the we-sell-books-for-a-living!-please-buy-fewer-titles-from-us! dept

Publishers are at it again, levying what amount to economic sanctions against that infamous freeloader hangout, The Library. In a move that will endear it to exactly no one, Hachette is increasing its back catalog prices 220% for ebooks, sticking it to the cherished public institutions whose shelves (including the digital ones) are lined with nothing but Lost Sales (apparently).

Hachette has been hard at work dragging its reputation through the mud. You may remember it from a few weeks ago, when it greeted Tor's announcement that it was going DRM-free with "HAHAHA but no, seriously, there will be DRM." This move seems ill-advised at best, what with some authors banding together to offer their titles to libraries for $dirt cheap, a price that falls more in line with the economic realities of the average library.

Hachette isn't the only publishing fish in the sea (and not even the only fish to jack up its prices -- Random House dialed its prices up 300% in March). Hachette is one of several publishers, many of whom haven't increased prices (or at least, not as severely). Of course, other publishers have gone other routes, including limiting the number of lends on their ebooks, making their digital offerings the equivalent of poorly manufactured physical books (Falls Apart After 26 Uses!). As a whole, the Big Six treat libraries like an intrusive vagrant.

So the current state of the library ebook market is this:

• 2 major publishers which charge high prices (Hachette, Random House)
• 2 major publishers which won’t sell at all (Macmillan, Simon & Schuster)
• Penguin, which is only selling ebooks to libraries grudgingly and with support for the Kindle explicitly blocked
• HarperCollins, which imposed a 26 checkout limit for library ebooks

I realize the publishers are running businesses, not charities, but those on the end of these price hikes are running something much closer to a charity than a business, relying on late fees, used book sales and donations to keep their shelves stocked. Considering many potential customers use libraries as tools for discovery, it would seem to be in their best interest to get as many of their titles in front of readers as possible, rather than price themselves out of a well-respected lending system.

Hachette's pricing "strategy" is doubly disappointing, considering it was once one of the "good guys:"

Hachette used to be one of the bright lights in library ebooks because they charged the regular retail price for their ebooks. And even though they wouldn’t sell their front list titles to libraries, at least we knew the titles would eventually be available. Only now those titles will be terribly expensive.

Christopher Harris, writing for the American Library Association, wonders if Hachette has forgotten how to publish.

Hachette is increasing backlist prices by 220% and … what? And we get ownership? And we get increased simultaneous lending? And we get anything other than another price gouge from a publisher that seems to not comprehend the basic fundamentals of publishing?

Let’s make this really easy to understand. Publishers publish content. Libraries buy content. As long as publishers keep publishing content, libraries will keep buying content. Why? Because libraries buy content. Only we buy it from a relatively fixed budget.

By drastically increasing the price of backlist titles, all Hachette is doing is reducing the funding that can go towards purchasing its new titles.

Harris points out that libraries aren't looking for handouts. They're looking for a mutually beneficial relationship, one that rewards publishers, readers and writers. But trying to turn a back catalog into a cash cow on the back of the library system helps no one.

That is why I cannot begin to comprehend this move by Hachette. Increasing backlist prices must either reduce the available budget for new titles or reduce acquisition of backlist titles—lost sales for Hachette either way. Furthermore, it reveals a lack of focus on the part of Hachette; instead of building profits on releasing the best possible titles every year, the company is stuck looking backwards. Finally, it shows a lack of understanding about the benefit of having more open access to backlist titles as additional entry points into new book purchases.

This short-sightedness seems to be more and more commonplace, especially in industries affected by digital disruption. The focus has shifted from building a sustainable business to concentrating on quarterly reports. Concentrating on immediate results tends to lead toward efforts that do far more long-term damage than any short-term gains can hope to balance out.

Filed Under: ebooks, education, learning, libraries, prices

The Secret To Better Education... Is Dumb Robots?

from the surprise... dept

A year ago, in writing about innovation in education, I mentioned an observation I had about learning, combined with a prediction about how technology could help revolutionize education in a good way:

One of the other lessons I learned in teaching (and in tutoring before that) was that the best way to truly master a subject is to teach it yourself, and have people asking you to explain it back to them. This is why I'm not joking up above when I talk about the possibilities of having certain subjects taught by other students as well. You might think you fully understand a subject, but just wait until people start asking questions (similarly, despite quite a bit of study in the subject, my full "understanding" of certain aspects of information economics didn't become really clear until I had to explain them repeatedly via this blog). And, of course, it need not be students teaching students -- but you could have software designed to act like a "learning" student, where the student has to "teach" the software.

It appears that others have had the same idea... and been doing some studies about it. Via TechCrunch, we learn of some new research, by Shizuko Matsuzoe and Fumihide Tanaka at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, that found that when students "taught" a "dumb" robot, they learned a subject much better (in this case, it was Japanese students learning English):

Matsuzoe and Tanaka found that the children did best when the robot appeared to learn from them. This also made the children more likely to want to continue learning with the robot.

They note that most traditional "educational" robots tend to work in the other direction... acting as "teachers" for the kids. But those appear to not be nearly as effective as when you flip the relationship. As I found back when I taught, having people continually ask you questions to clarify their own understanding forces you to truly understand the subject yourself at a much deeper level than if you're just a "student."

You can take a look at the full study over here (which, it's great to see, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License). And there are some really interesting findings. First, the difference in performance with and without the robot is pretty significant: But perhaps even more interesting is that "3 to 5 weeks later" result. This actually went against the researchers' hypothesis going into the research (I'm always a fan of research that rejects researchers' initial hypothesis!). They expected that after a few weeks had passed, students would gradually forget some of what they learned. But what they found was really encouraging. It seems that the experience itself made them even more interested in continuing the learning process, and those who learned with the robot really seemed to figure out how to "teach themselves" much better:

Contrary to our initial assumption, the average percentage of questions answered correctly was in fact higher than the results obtained on the day of the experiment (we predicted that it would have been lower because the children might have forgotten the learned verbs). Subsequent interviews with parents (details in Section 6.3.3) provided us with some clues for this result. Most parents told us that their children appeared to enjoy the experience of teaching the care-receiving robot so much that he or she continued to play the game at home, even after several days, weeks, and wherever similar objects were found.

While this is still early research, it's definitely encouraging, and hopefully more people will start to explore similar ideas. Teaching kids by having them teach others could be a really effective way to create a much deeper level of understanding within students, rather than just teaching them to learn by rote.

Filed Under: education, learning, robots, teaching

Will Free Online College Courses Actually Widen The Socio-Educational Gap?

from the mmm-probably-not dept

While we recently discussed how licensing schemes can make the intersection of the internet and education very expensive and complex, there's also been some news recently going in the opposite direction. Coursera, a company that partners with colleges to provide free online courses, recently announced that it has expanded its partnerships to include several top-tier schools, such as Princeton, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. Meanwhile, MIT, Berkley, and Harvard announced that they are going to start a similar program at their schools called edX. The goals for both of these groups is to democratize higher education, opening the doors of social progress through the power of the internet and online courses.

And yet some would argue that the opposite will occur. Take, for instance, Noliwe M. Rooks, associate professor at Cornell and author of several books. Contributing to Time, she argues that online courses will have the opposite effect and actually widen the socio-educational gap between the rich and poor, and also along racial lines. I think such a theory is horribly myopic, but let's take a look.

Despite near universal enthusiasm for such projects, it’s important to take a few steps back. First, although the content is free now, it’s unlikely that it will remain that way for long. According to an analysis of one of Coursera’s contracts, both the company and the schools plan to make a profit — they just haven’t figured out the best way to do that yet.

A couple of problems here. First, while the industries are by no means fully analogous, I imagine that there were people years back who said the exact same thing about Google's search business. Or YouTube's video business. You'll note that both remain free to users to this day. Perhaps so shall Coursera. But, secondly, even the link Rooks provides to demonstrate her fear that students will eventually be charged doesn't really do that at all. The team at Coursera is currently brainstorming ways to monetize the business, but charging for what the company is calling course-completion "certificates" is only one idea. They've also discussed corporate sponsorship and advertising-supported monetization. The point is that charging for courses isn't some forgone conclusion and, whatever these certificates would cost, the investment on the part of the student would still be a far cry from what it costs to attend a university these days. But then Rooks goes on to make what are her two key points. The first is that online education isn't as effective as the classroom experience.

In terms of learning on the college level, the Department of Education looked at thousands of research studies from 1996 to 2008 and found that in higher education, students rarely learned as much from online courses as they did in traditional classes. In fact, the report found that the biggest benefit of online instruction came from a blended learning environment that combined technology with traditional methods, but warned that the uptick had more to do with the increased amount of individualized instruction students got in that environment, not the presence of technology. For all but the brightest, the more time students spend with traditional instruction, the better they seem to do.

It would be very easy at this point for the reader of Rooks's piece to see a fork in the road, where one must choose to either agree that online education is inferior or disagree and dismiss her argument. I'll do neither, because the question is moot. Remember that we're talking about the impact this is going to have on the socio-educational gap, not on the average student. Looking at it from that perspective, the effectiveness of free online education at Princeton (or any other school) compared with the effectiveness of in-classroom education at that same school is of no meaning whatsoever. The comparison to be made is between the effectiveness of free online education at Princeton (or any other school) versus not being able to afford an education at that same school at all. When viewed in its proper context, I can't see how anyone could argue that these free courses will do anything besides close the socio-educational gap.

And, finally, we have the argument that this will chiefly benefit both rich and white communities:
 

Supporters of online learning say that all anyone needs to access a great education is a stable Internet connection. But only 35% of households earning less than $25,000 have broadband access to the Internet, compared with 94% of households with income in excess of $100,000. In addition, according to the 2010 Pew Report on Mobile Access, only half of black and Latino homes have Internet connections at all, compared with almost 65% of white households. Perhaps most significant, many blacks and Latinos primarily use their cell phones to access the Internet, a much more expensive and less-than-ideal method for taking part in online education. In short, the explosion of this type of educational instruction, though free now, may leave behind the students who need education the most.

Again, it would be very easy for the reader at this point to pick a side, either believing Rooks's numbers or not and drawing a conclusion. I won't, because no matter where those numbers are right now, they are not static. I would argue that anyone believing that wider adoption of internet connections and greater reliability aren't only going to increase as time goes on doesn't know what they're talking about. So, even if there is an "internet gap" of sorts today, be it along racial or economic borders, that's only going to decrease. Given that Coursera just started up, drawing the conclusion that it, and future companies like it, are going to help widen the socio-education gap seems rather odd.

Filed Under: learning, online courses, socio-educational gap

New Research Shows How Copyright Law Is Keeping Useful Info Off Wikipedia

from the too-bad dept

The Atlantic has an interesting article about some forthcoming research from MIT PhD student Abhishek Nagaraj (though, oddly, the article never introduces him, never mentions his first name, and just refers to him throughout by his last name only). It's the latest in an increasingly long line of evidence showing how copyright is stifling content and keeping it from reaching the public in useful ways. Nagaraj found a particularly useful natural experiment in the archives of Baseball Digest "the oldest and longest-running journal of matters baseball-related," which has been published continuously since 1942. For various reasons (sounds like they didn't renew...) the issues from 1942 until 1964 are in the public domain. Everything after that... not so much. Google's book scanning project scanned nearly every issue from July 1945 until 2008.

Nagaraj realized that Wikipedians were using this as good source material for Wikipedia pages -- especially on the profiles of older baseball players. He noted that there was little stopping the text from being rewritten, but the real issue was around images. People could use the scanned images to illustrate the profiles, but clearly they could only use the public domain ones without permission.

But Nagaraj found was that the availability of public domain material dramatically improved the article's images. Before the digitization, players from between '44 and '64 had an average of .183 pictures on their articles. The '64 to '84 group had about .158 pictures. But after digitization, those numbers dramatically changed: there were 1.15 pictures on each of the older group's articles -- but only .667 in the new group. More recent players, covered by privately-owned parts of Baseball Digest, had half as many images on their pages as did old-timers.

And, yes, the article notes that he put in place various controls to correct for unrelated differences. Basically, the only observable difference in why the pages have more images is the public domain status of some of those works vs. others. Some might argue that this is no big deal, but he found a second bit of useful data s well:

And the effects of this -- of just having an image on the page -- cascaded to other metrics. "Out-of-copyright" players's pages saw a significant boost in traffic. Articles from the pre-'64 that were already in the top 10 percent saw their hits increase more than 70 percent. Articles from that group in the least-popular ten percent saw traffic to their articles increase by 25 percent. Those pages were more frequently edited across the board, too. And this makes sense: Google rewards updated content, and it rewards images. The out-of-copyright players provided more of both.

I'm reminded, yet again, of that chart of the now infamous gap in books under copyright that you can't find any more -- even though older books in the public domain are widely available. Once again, we're seeing not only the massive value of the public domain, but how much useful content is being locked away by excessively strict (and excessively long) copyright law.

Filed Under: baseball digest, copyright, information, learning, public domain, wikipedia

Techno-Panic Headlines: 'Enhanced Ebooks Are Bad For Children'

from the sensationalism dept

It's no secret that the media loves techno-panic stories, especially when they can quote some scientist or researcher condemning a new technology. Sometimes the studies they point to are bogus, but more often than not the fault lies with the reporters, who oversimplify or flat-out misrepresent the findings. The Guardian recently published a perfect example of this, where even the story itself seems to admit that the facts are far less sensational than the headline.

And that headline is pretty blunt: Enhanced ebooks are bad for children finds American study. Bad for children, huh? That must mean there were some pretty clear negative results in whatever this study looked at, right? Not so much. When you read the details, you discover that the study was looking specifically at a book's ability to promote literacy and reading comprehension, where it found that ebooks with interactive graphical bells and whistles distract focus from the text and are inferior in that regard. But the study's authors also note, quite firmly, that this is simply something for parents and educators to keep in mind when deciding on activities for their kids, and that enhanced ebooks are still fantastic for helping to engage kids who are otherwise uninterested in books. Basically, they say a lot of enhanced ebooks fall more on the play side of things than the study side—but kids play, and it's actually great if some of that play involves storytelling and reading, even if it's done in a lighter fashion. In short, they absolutely do not say that enhanced ebooks are "bad for children".

Children reading enhanced ebooks also "recalled significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story", said the researchers, speculating that the extra features may be distracting. But while "print books were more advantageous for literacy building co-reading", ebooks, and particularly enhanced ebooks, were better "for engaging children and prompting physical interaction".

...

Chiong told the Guardian that enhanced ebooks "absolutely still have a place. Kids seem to love them. If enhanced books can engage kids who might not be as interested in reading, we will achieve an important goal. In our study, we were specifically looking at book-reading with a focus on learning and comprehension. That is only one of many purposes for reading. If the purpose is to just have fun or explore a classic tale in a new way, enhanced books are great."

What's not mentioned, but seems obvious, is the fact that this same argument could be applied to books with sound effects, pop-up books, and for that matter just books with illustrations—all things that potentially detract from "pure" literacy but serve to make kids more interested in reading. The researchers also note that enhanced ebooks can be done well and done poorly: the right kinds of interactivity, actually relating to the narrative, can be far less distracting and maybe even beneficial—it's the unnecessary ornamentation that is the core problem. That's not unlike any form of entertainment, even for adults: just see debates about the use of 3D in movies for an example.

So what we actually have here is a pretty interesting study that sheds some light on the way kids interact with enhanced reading material while refraining from taking any extreme positions on the technology. Every newspaper headline writer just fell asleep while reading that sentence.

Filed Under: ebooks, education, learning, techno-panic

The Biggest 'Pirates' And 'Freeloaders' Of Them All? College Professors And Librarians

from the freetards dept

There's an interesting article over at Law.com highlighting just how many lawsuits there are in which college professors and librarians are fighting back against overly draconian copyright laws. Most of the cases they mention are ones we've discussed here, but it's a good article overall. It talks about the Georgia State fair use case, the UCLA case about streaming video, and the Authors Guild suit against the Hathitrust for trying to make books more accessible.

The really incredible thing in all of this is that copyright is supposed to be about the encouragement of learning. In fact, the first US federal copyright law was called "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." But, the fact is that universities and librarians are constantly bumping up against the ridiculous and over-aggressive limits of copyright law in ways that prevent them from basic tasks that aid in education and learning.

Copyright system defenders love to paint critics of today's copyright laws as merely being a bunch of "freeloaders" and "pirates." That's a ridiculous assertion. The big problem of copyright law today is how it impacts everyday people doing everyday things. The fact that so many professors and librarians -- those who are at the forefront of the "encouragement of learning" -- are discovering that copyright law gets in their way more than it helps suggests a law that is completely out of touch with its intended purpose. This isn't about freeloaders and pirates. This is about some of the fundamental principles of education.

Filed Under: education, learning, library
Companies: authors guild, hathitrust

DailyDirt: I Want A New Drug...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Many mind-altering drugs lead to trouble at some point. But what about treatments that help improve memory or intelligence? Forget those energy drinks, serious scientists are working on ways to improve memory and learning skills. Here are just a few examples.

• A protein named the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) seems to be correlated with exercise and improved memory. But exercise is hard, so there'll be plenty of BDNF pills and 'Flowers for Algernon' situations to look forward to. [url]
• Taking drugs like Ritalin and caffeine might provide a temporary boost to mental abilities, but R&D efforts to discover a pill that permanently improves brain function are likely futile. Pharmaceutical companies benefit more from treatments rather than cures, anyway. [url]
• Air Force researchers have figured out a way to reduce training time by 50% -- using mild electrical currents delivered to pilots' heads. The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), and the treated pilots have been reported to say, "I know Kung Fu" in a Keanu-like way. [url]
• To discover more interesting articles on the human mind, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: air force, bdnf, drugs, learning, memory, ritalin, tdcs, tms, transcranial direct current stimulation

Online Technology Entrepreneurship Class At Stanford Postponed... Because Of Copyright

from the first-lesson:-fix-copyright dept

The Constitutional clause often referred to as the Copyright Clause involves granting the power to Congress:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Many people get confused and don't realize that the "Science" part was really about copyright (not the "useful arts.") And, by "science" they really meant "learning." In fact, the very first US Copyright law, in 1790, was entitled:

An ACT for the Encouragement of Learning

So you would think that the use of copyright law to block the encouragement of learning would be unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Jon sent over the news that the online Technology Entrepreneurship class he'd been looking forward to taking from Stanford University has apparently been postponed due to copyright issues. According to the classes' professor, Chuck Eesley:

Unfortunately, the launch of my Technology Entrepreneurship online course has been placed on hold, due to delays surrounding copyright and intellectual property clearance issues. We are working on this and I anticipate providing you with an update within the next few months.

In an age where there's lots of support and interest in online education, to find out that copyright law, of all things, is being used to block education seems like a complete travesty.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, education, entrepreneurship, learning, stanford university