Is Policing Plagiarism At A University As Counterproductive As Trying To Stop Copyright Infringement?

from the seems-like-it dept

We've talked in the past about how multiple studies have shown that greater enforcement efforts to stop copyright infringement aren't particularly effective. One of the reasons for this is that they tend to piss off and anger the biggest fans, which has significant ripple effects and unintended consequences. A few months ago, there was an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I'm finally getting around to writing about, all about one NYU CS professor's experience in trying to catch and deal with cheaters on tests.

The professor, Panagiotis Ipeirotis, wrote a very detailed blog post about what happened, but after it went viral online, and some others expressed concerns that it may have violated the privacy of some students, he took the post down. The Chronicle of Higher Education had a mirror of the post up for a while, but have since taken it down. What was really amazing is that Ipeirotis spends much of the post explaining just how "effective" his efforts to catch cheaters was. He was mainly using the (somewhat controversial) service Turnitin, and certainly found a lot of folks who were clearly copying answers from elsewhere. Reading just the first part of the post would make you think this had all been a huge success and that Ipeirortis was actually singing the praises of such software.

But he's not. The key point was that it absolutely destroyed classroom morale. Rather than coming to class each day eager to learn, students (apparently even those who weren't cheating) just weren't as happy about the overall learning experience in the classroom. And part of that may have come from Ipeirotis, who notes that he spent a ton of time that semester "dealing with" cheaters and his general distrust may have carried over into the classroom. He notes that the whole class was a lot less fun and a lot less focused on actually learning.

That was clear in the classroom and later came through in the evaluations, which were significantly lower than usual -- which also resulted in him getting a smaller raise. While some responded to the blog post by focusing just on the evaluations and the raise, he noted later that the evaluations was a lesser issue compared to the more general one, and in a later post, he noted it was the other issue that was the real problem:

Even if I had received a $1M bonus from NYU for my efforts, the basic problem would still be there: the teaching experience would degenerate into a witch hunt, focusing on cheating, instead of being about learning. And yes, I would still write the same blog post even if I were fully satisfied with my annual evaluation. In fact, the blog post was in my folder of draft posts for a few months now, long before receiving my annual evaluation.

This is a key point that we've been trying to make about enforcement in the copyright world. Even when it seems "effective," the overall environment -- created by suing fans, by trying to lock down technologies, by pursuing new draconian laws and by blaming people for sharing information -- is simply toxic. It's not a positive environment in which new beneficial ideas and solutions come forth readily. It's an angry us-vs.-them world, rather than a "let's learn and solve problems together" world.

And just as we've suggested all sorts of new business models that simply take "infringement" out of the equation, Ipeirotis similarly suggests that professors get around the whole cheating/plagiarism issue not by trying to crack down on cheating, but on creating situations where cheating is impossible or less effective:

He suggested several options. You could require that projects be made public, which would risk embarrassment for someone who wanted to copy from a past semester. You could assign homework where students give class presentations and then are graded by their peers, ratcheting up the social pressure to perform well. And you could create an incentive to do good work by turning homework into a competition, like asking students to build Web sites and rewarding those that get the most clicks.

The simple fact is that some people will always find a way to infringe, just as some people will always find a way to cheat. But plenty of others will not. Plenty of people want to support the content creators they like, just as plenty of people at universities really do want to learn. What many who focus on enforcement and punishment don't realize is that creating an environment that focuses solely on punishing those who infringe or cheat does have serious and significant spillover effects and unintended consequences on the rest of the "market/class." If, instead, you focus on the people who do want to support or who do want to learn, and provide them with a positive environment to do so, it actually ends up creating consequences in the other direction -- often turning around those who wanted to infringe or to cheat, and turning them into good actors as they see what's happening around them.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, panagiotis ipeirotis, plagiarism, universities

Court Says College Can Snoop On Students' Email

from the no-privacy-violation dept

There have been plenty of cases where courts have said that it's okay for an employer to snoop on (employer-provided) employee email accounts. And now there's a case saying basically the same thing for colleges and universities. As long as they provided the email system, there's apparently no violation of anti-snooping or data privacy laws. I definitely understand the reasoning here, though one might argue that the relationship between a student and a university is quite different than an employee and employer. And I could see how students might have a much higher expectation of privacy. Still, do students really use university email addresses any more, or do they have their own primary email accounts that they had before heading off to school?

Filed Under: college, email, privacy, snooping, universities

More Canadian Universities Opt Out Of Access Copyright's Skyrocketing Tariffs

from the unfair-'deals'-are-paving-the-way-for-an-explosion-of-'fair-dealing& dept

Following up on the University of Calgary's decision to drop Access Copyright after 1,300% rate increase, Michael Geist has compiled a still-growing list of Canadian colleges who have decided to opt-out of Acess Copyright's increasingly expensive service.

As of July 29th, the list looks like this:

1. Columbia Bible College (BC)
2. Royal Roads University (BC)
3. Quest University (BC)
4. University of Calgary (AB)
5. Lethbridge College (AB)
6. University of Alberta (AB)
7. Mount Royal University (AB)
8. Portage College (AB)
9. Athabasca University (AB)
10. NorQuest College (AB)
11. University of Manitoba (MB)
12. University of Saskatchewan (SK)
13. University of Regina (SK)
14. University of Guelph (ON)
15. Queens University (ON)
16. University of Waterloo (ON)
17. University of Windsor (ON)
18. York University (ON)
19. Carleton University (ON)
20. Holland College (PEI)
21. University of PEI (PEI)
22. University of New Brunswick (NB)
23. Memorial University (NL)
24. Mount Saint Vincent University (NS)
25. Acadia University (NS)
26. Dalhousie University (NS)

As Geist points out, this is going to hit Access Copyright hard:

The current list includes 14 of the 25 biggest Canadian universities (as measured by the number of students).

Looks like Access Copyright is going to have to swiftly familiarize itself with an economic truism, one that most politicians seem unable to comprehend: If you tax something (and that's really what this is -- an arbitrary fee that enables Access Copyright to stay solvent enough to ask for more arbitrary fees), you get less of it.

This sort of misguided thinking rarely troubles businesses that provide products and services. These businesses are (usually) at the mercy of the customers who help determine, via "vote by wallet," what they can charge for their products. However, entities like royalty collection services and governments somehow still feel that they can increase their fees in order to increase their total income, despite repeated evidence to the contrary.

Ask New York City how that huge cigarette tax is working out for them. It's increased the per-pack fee so much that smokers are becoming amateur bootleggers. How about you, Chicago? Slapped a nickel-per-bottle tax on bottled water, did you? Enjoy watching all those extra nickels roll right out to the suburbs. How's that "tax the hell out of Amazon" plan coming along, various states? Null set?

Same thing here. By asking for more (much more), Access Copyright is pricing itself right out of the market. At this point its balance sheets are going to need a complete overhaul. This short-sighted plan most likely led to irrational exuberance at the AC offices, but once everyone sobers up (and that list of universities is pretty sobering), they're going to find that a 1,300% fee increase is going to do some particularly ugly things to the bottom line.

Even worse, this tariff is supposed to benefit the many writers, artists, etc. that Access Copyright represents. So, through no fault of their own, these "represented" artists are going to see diminishing returns on their investment in copyright. Whoever came up with the "skyrocketing tariff" plan needs to be removed from their position posthaste. (Unless Access Copyright is taking suggestions from mailroom clerks or that one guy at the end of the bar, in which case no further action is necessary. Or wise.) Sooner or later, the practice of increasing fees to offset dwindling revenue catches up with businesses like these and they end up fading away, trying desperately to multiply by zero.

Filed Under: canada, copyright, universities
Companies: access copyright

Obscure(ish) Academic Fair Use Case Has Potential For Wide-Ranging Impact

from the fair-use-for-education dept

Recently, Tim Geigner had a post about the lawsuit concerning fair use at Georgia State University. Nancy Sims, the Copyright Librarian at University of Minnesota Libraries offered to write up a guest post delving into the deeper issues raised by this lawsuit.

Trial is currently under way in a copyright suit against Georgia State University brought by a number of academic publishers (and funded by an interesting additional party). We won't know the outcome of the trial for a while, and the losing party (whoever it ends up being) will almost certainly appeal the district court's decision, so the case hasn't attracted much attention outside of academic spheres. But it has the potential to set some far-reaching precedents on fair use, and anyone interesting in copyright and tech policy should be following.

The publisher-plaintiffs are suing over the way instructors (and possibly others on campus) share course readings like academic articles and excerpts from academic books. They are objecting both to readings posted on course websites (i.e., uploaded by instructors and accessible only to students registered for a course) and readings shared via "e-reserves" (i.e., shared online through university libraries, usually also with access restricted to students registered for the course). The publishers claim that sharing copies of readings with students is not usually a fair use, that faculty can't really be trusted to make their own calls about what is or is not fair use, and that permissions fees should be paid for most of these uses.

Without going into the details of the draconian injunction the publishers have requested if they prevail, the baseline claim of the lawsuit - that few of these uses are fair uses - is a pretty extreme one. The publisher-plaintiffs are emphasizing that online sharing of readings is equivalent to paper photocopied coursepacks, because lawsuits in the 1990s established that it's not fair use when commercial copy shops sell paper coursepacks for profit. Suddenly the copy shops (which had been providing the coursepacks for just over reproduction costs) had to clear licensing for each article or chapter included. (Fun party trick: to identify which individuals in a room full of academics were students later than 1996; simply ask them whether their coursepacks were affordable, or expensive. Additional fun: watch the expressions on the faces of pre-1996 students when you tell them how much coursepacks currently cost students - as much as $500 per pack!) Incidentally, the Copyright Clearance Center, the ostensibly non-profit organization that facilitates paying for those permissions, although not a party to the Georgia State suit, is underwriting the publisher-plaintiffs' litigation fees.

But the "coursepack cases" were all focused on copying at commercial copy shops. None of the currently-contested uses are for-profit. The only market harm is that the publishers are willing to license every use, but the academic community is not taking them up on this offer. (Much of the content shared in course websites has even already been purchased once for campus use as licensed library resources - although most of the licenses are only for access through the publisher website. E-reserve materials are less likely to be materials for which the library already has subscription access - they're more likely to be unique or one-off materials.) While the fair use statute does say that harm to "potential markets" is relevant to a fair use determination, a ruling against fair use at Georgia State would do a lot to establish that any time a copyright holder is willing to sell a license, not taking them up on it is inherently infringement.

It is also helpful for the plaintiffs to focus on coursepacks because in those cases, copy shops were held responsible for the decisions instructors made about what readings to copy for their students. In the Georgia State case, the plaintiffs are arguing not just that most course reading uses are not fair uses, but that the University should be responsible for individual instructors' decisions on fair use. Certainly, individual instructors may make bad decisions about fair use sometimes, but the publishers don't want to deal with the inefficiency and negative PR that would accompany suing individual instructors. Trying to have the institution held liable makes for a very efficient lawsuit, and if the tactic succeeds, will force the institution to develop a single policy on use of course materials - vitiating the flexibility and case-by-case determination that fair use is supposed to provide far more rapidly than suits against individuals would.

However much the plaintiffs would like it to be so, paper coursepacks are not the only relevant comparison. For example "e-reserves" are very similar to more traditional "course reserves", where a physical copy of an item is held "on reserve" at the library and individual students can check it out for short periods of time. Most students check out reserve materials just long enough to photocopy or scan the readings for their own use - and many would accept that those personal copies are legitimate fair uses. Sharing articles on course websites is very similar to an instructor handing out paper copies in class - again, a practice many would consider to be a fair use. Even the existing precedents against some uses of research articles admit that making personal copies of articles for research is often a fair use - "We do not deal with the question of copying by an individual, for personal use in research or otherwise (not for resale), recognizing that under the fair use doctrine or the de minimis doctrine, such a practice by an individual might well not constitute an infringement." (AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION v. TEXACO INC., 60 F.3d 913 (2nd Cir. 1994).)

Finally, the copyright statute explicitly includes "multiple copies for classroom use" as an example of a fair use. Certainly it is possible that some of the e-reserves and course website uses that instructors undertake trespass outside the bounds of fair use. But no institution can police use decisions on the part of all its participants at the level of responsibility this suit seeks to impose without creating policies that wipe out any contextual sensitivity or flexibility in what is supposed to be copyright's "breathing space". Additionally, because copies for classroom use are an archetypical fair use, if the publisher-plaintiffs prevail in this suit, it undermines fair use claims in all of the other areas explicitly listed in the statute (including "criticism, comment, news reporting, [...] scholarship, or research") - much less those not enumerated specifically as examples of fair uses. This obscure academic fair use lawsuit has the potential for broad impact on us all.

Update: Since this post was written, there have been some updates on the case, which you can read about here. It appears that the "nightmare scenario" has been avoided for now...

Filed Under: copyright, fair use, universities

University Of Glasgow Frees Up Research Instead Of Trying To Sell It All

from the good-for-them dept

We've pointed out how badly many universities have fallen for the myth of magical profits from tech transfer efforts. In the last 30 years or so, there's been this massive effort for some universities to try to profit off of "commercializing" their research. What they did was set up expensive "tech transfer" offices that were in charge of taking university research, patenting it, and then trying to find buyers. The theory, then, was that the university would make lots of money and companies would get access to all this great university research. The reality is that this hasn't worked out at all. First of all, that whole theory skipped over the part that prior to locking up all that research, companies already had access to it -- and were able to actually make use of it quickly because they didn't have to go through a crazy and expensive licensing process.

The other problem is that, since these tech transfer offices are focused on making money, and all they have to sell is patents, they started to overvalue the patents themselves, making them prohibitively expensive, which actually decreased the ability to get those ideas out to the commercial sector and to turn that research into big money. And, did we mention how expensive it is to set up and run some of these tech transfer offices? A study from a few years back found that the majority of tech transfer offices lost money, with only a tiny handful (somewhere around a dozen) actually making money.

Oh, and on top of all that, this focus on putting up locks for the sake of charging has actually made basic research much harder as well, since much of it is based on freely sharing ideas -- which is made more difficult when you want to hoard the idea in order to get a patent.

At some point, you would think universities would recognize this. They're losing money, harming their own research and going against their basic principles as institutions for disseminating knowledge. Thankfully, some are finally starting to get the message. James Boyle points us to the news that the University of Glasgow has announced that it will be offering up most of its research under a free license. It is still reserving a few "key" bits of research for fee-based licensing, but it appears the default will now be free, which seems like it should be a good thing in terms of actually commercializing the research out of the university.

Filed Under: free, licensing, research, tech transfer, universities
Companies: university of glasgow

MPAA Reminding Universities They Need To Crack Down On File Sharing -- Leaves Out How It Lied To Get The Law Passed

from the omissions dept

Back in 2008, we wrote about how the MPAA convinced Congress to pass legislation to make colleges and universities responsible for reducing copyright infringement on campus or lose federal funding. The law was really a trial run of sorts -- an attempt to see how this could work for making ISPs responsible. Of course, in order to get the law passed, the MPAA flat out lied. It made up numbers, saying that 44% of "losses" from file sharing came from college campuses. This number was so ridiculously wrong that the MPAA later claimed "human error" before saying the number was really 15%. But even that was dubious -- and when the GAO asked the MPAA to support these numbers, the MPAA refused to provide the data. Pretty telling.

So, the entire law was passed under totally false pretenses. If Congress had any sense of what's right, it would repeal the law. But, instead, the law went into effect recently, and now the MPAA is sending out letters reminding universities that they need to start acting like copyright cops. Of course, they leave out the fact that they got the law put in place by lying to Congress. Funny how they would omit that. So, kids, the lesson of the day is: it's okay to lie to Congress to force colleges to spend money to protect your obsolete business model, but sharing a movie you really liked with a friend is evil. Makes sense.

Filed Under: colleges, file sharing, universities
Companies: mpaa

Colleges Cracking Down On High Schools Using Their Logos

from the logo-wars dept

We recently had a story of a high school caught with a logo copied from the Dodge Ram logo. Apparently, this idea of high schools copying their logos is hardly an isolated instance. For decades, it's been commonplace for high schools to just copy the logos of various colleges (or, at least use them for very close "inspiration"), but lately colleges have started cracking down on this practice, threatening high schools, or even demanding payment. This is really the latest result of a trend we've noted in the past, where universities and colleges have taken trademarks to a new level after some court rulings suggested exclusive rights in college logos existed. Of course, it seems a bit silly. It's not as if anyone's going to buy a high school t-shirt instead of the college shirt, but it seems like these universities and colleges want to be aggressive with their trademark efforts. At least some appear to have very reasonable licensing programs. Apparently KSU lets anyone use their logo for $1 every two years -- but does put some restrictions on it, such as not letting you sell t-shirts with the inspired logo unless they use a KSU-connected vendor, who gives a percentage to the university.

Filed Under: high schools, logos, trademark, universities

University Promises To Report File Sharers To Police, Tells Students They Can Spend 5 Years In Jail

from the this-is-what-we-teach-people? dept

Remember a few years back when the entertainment industry used totally bogus stats (which they later admitted were bogus) to get Congress to pass new laws requiring universities to become copyright cops? While many universities have been struggling under the economic burdens of this law, apparently one university, Valdosta State University, in Georgia, has embraced the new law with gusto, not only implementing a new system, but promising to turn those caught over to the police (see update below), and warning them that they face five years in jail, as well as fines. Of course, it seems rather doubtful that those caught sharing a file would be guilty of criminal copyright infringement, so I can't imagine the local police will even know what to do with the information it's being given. But it's rather unfortunate that the University has decided to become a tool of entertainment industry propaganda, rather than actually choosing to understand the real issues at stake. Update: The University and the school paper have since both contacted TorrentFreak to let them know that the reporter got the story wrong, misunderstanding a basic copyright warning, leading to the false report -- so that students will not, in fact, be reported to the police.

Filed Under: copyright, police, universities
Companies: valdosta state university

Colleges Experimenting With Bulk-Buying E-Textbooks... And Forcing Students To Pay Up

from the bye-bye-used-book-market dept

We've pointed out in the past how the college textbook market is ripe for disruption. You have a market where books are ridiculously overpriced by publishers, knowing that students are often compelled to purchase the product. As book prices have continued to rise, apparently some universities are experimenting with bulk buying licenses to ebook textbooks and simply charging the students a fee. The schools all say they're doing this to reduce textbook fees -- and I'm sure they mean well. But the very fact that many publishers seem to be jumping on this as well suggests that they know damn well, in the end, this will work out well for them. First, it forces all the students to "buy" the books at full price. It wipes out the secondary market (which many students make use of in selling their books back), and even the case of the student who just checks the book out of the library. Also, we've seen in places like Canada how a simple mandatory student fee can start out low, and then suddenly jump massively. It's good that some universities want to lower book fees, and making use of ebooks is a possible solution, but mandatory fees seem ripe for abuse.

Filed Under: ebooks, education, textbooks, universities

More Evidence Shows That Locking Up University Research With Patents Doesn't Help

from the locking-up-research-is-a-failure dept

For many years, we've discussed how the Bayh-Dole Act, which created incentives for universities to patent the (often federally-funded) research results of professors, has been a dismal failure. The failure is based on the same faulty reason for why people think that patent system itself increases innovation -- even in the face of an awful lot of evidence to the contrary. The mistake is in thinking that the key incentives for research is to extract the greatest dollar value in return, and that the key to commercialization is licensing. Neither is true. In academic settings, research is driven by a variety of factors, many of which have little relation to commercial incentives. Second, the key to commercialization tends to be market need, not licensing opportunity.

But, because of this, tons of universities thought they were going to be rich and set up "tech transfer" offices to help license this new found wealth of patents. Reality hasn't been kind. With a small number of exceptions (the big famous universities like Stanford and MIT), nearly every one of these tech transfer offices have lost money for the universities that set them up. In part, this is often because tech transfer offices like to overvalue the patent, and completely undervalue the actual execution necessary. But, more importantly, the research that comes out in this manner often just doesn't have that much commercial potential -- and a big reason for that may actually be the patents themselves.

By locking up the technology with patents, it's decreased incentives for sharing ideas, which is where real growth and real innovation comes from. The end result is -- entirely contrary to the predictions of Bayh-Dole supporters -- that the law has decreased the output of researchers and decreased the value of that output. In other words, it's done the exact opposite of what it's promised -- and yet we still don't hear any talk of repealing such a dangerous law.

There's now some new research on trying to patent and commercialize university research, this time coming out of Canada, and it, too, has found that there's very little evidence of benefit from patenting and trying to license university research. Effectively, it found that the costs and benefits almost even out.

The latest report is based on survey data from 2008 which finds that the total IP income (primarily from licencing) at reporting Canadian universities was $53.2 million. The cost of generating this income? The reporting institutions employed 321 full-time employees in IP management for a cost of $51.1 million. In other words, after these direct costs, the total surplus for all Canadian universities was $2.1 million. The average income per university from IP was only $425,000. Patent applications and patents issued were actually down in the reporting institutions and there were less than two-dozen spin-off companies reported by the universities.

So, it's another bit of research suggesting this effort to patent university research has not done what it promised to do. So why do politicians still support such laws, when the empirical evidence has long shown that it does not do what those very same politicians promised?

Filed Under: bayh-dole, canada, patents, research, tech transfer, universities