The next cycle of course is now open for enrollment. The course will be led by Delia Browne, a copyright expert with enviable practical expertise in copyright and education. Delia will have a unmatched team of experts from different jurisdictions.

Go to p2pu to enroll now.

Or read more about the course:

“What is ‘Copyright for Educators’?
It is a six week course for educators who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing. It is open to all educators around the world.

The course is taught around practical case studies faced by teachers when using copyright material in their day to day teaching and educational instruction.

By answering the case scenarios and drafting and discussing the answers in groups, the participants learn:

*   about what copyright protects
*   whether exceptions or blanket licences apply
*   when they need to seek permission and who from
*   what an open education resource is
*   what a creative common licence is
*   how OER and CC can benefit teaching

Participants will also get to learn about how these issues are dealt with in different countries.

The Course leaders

As stated above, Delia Browne is the course organiser. She will be assisted by:

*   Lila Bailey (Creative Commons Counsel) based in San Francisco at Creative Commons
*   Jessica Coates (CC Australia and Queensland University of Technology) based in Brisbane
*   Tobias Schonwetter Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Intellectual Property Research Unit in South Africa
*   Prodromos Tsiavos – London School of Economics
*   Andrew Rens, Research Associate at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Intellectual Property Research Unit in South Africa .

How is the course taught?

The course is not taught, it is facilitated by the course leaders. The course is student participation focused.Students are divided into small groups to work through each week’s case scenario and the weekly readings.

The groups organise their online communications/discussions (via email, Google docs, Skype, tokbox etc) and jointly submit an answer to the weekly case scenario (week 1- 5) and final assignment (Week 6) on the course blog.

The http://p2pu.org<http://p2pu.org/> website platform allows students to communicate asynchronously via wikis (group communication and discussion) and a course blog (group answers submitted).

Synchronous tools are not supported by the site but there are recommendations of some real time communication tools each group may elect to use to hold a class meeting or discussion.

In addition, each group also provides an assessment of the other groups’ answers to the weekly case studies.

The leaders basically review and mark the student group work (pass/fail) that has been posted to the blog and provide comments where they have gone wrong.  As stated above, the leaders act as facilitators rather than traditional teachers.

In the final assignment, groups may elect to create helpful OER tools on copyright or draft a letter to their government on a copyright law reform issue or create an OER plan.”

The second cycle of courses begins shortly. I have posted a shortened version of p2pu’s official release below:

Peer 2 Peer University announced its second round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for 14 courses dealing in subject areas ranging from Physics to Transformational Art. Some of the courses were offered in the first phase of the pilot which launched last September, but seven are brand new, including “Urban Disaster Risk Management,” “Mashing Up the Open Web,” and “Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design.” P2PU is also excited to announce its first Portuguese language courses organized by Brasil’s Casa de Cultura Digital, one of which is an introduction to the thinking of Paulo Freire (educational theorist who is author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed). The P2PU community has grown and is excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.

Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://p2pu.org. Deadlines for sign-ups are 28, Feb 2010. The second pilot phase will run for six weeks from 12 March to 23 April. Each course application may require additional information.

The decision in University of Central Lancashire v Information Commissioner and Colquhoun states:

“We do not consider that the fundamentally charitable character of a university means that it should have no commercial interests. A body which depends on student fees to remain solvent has a commercial interest in maintaining the assets upon which the recruitment of students depends. Moreover, we accept on the evidence that UCLAN operates in competition with other institutions of higher education in seeking to sell its products, namely undergraduate courses, to potential students.”

It is important not to conclude that the ruling is saying that universities are commercial entities. Instead the tribunal found that universities do have commercial interests. It does not follow that universities are commercial entities by virtue of either their nature or their role in society.

The dispute

The tribunal is set up under United Kingdom Freedom of Information legislation, and decides appeals from rulings by the Information Commissioner on information requests. Professor Colquhoun a pharmacologist and research professor at University College London made an information request to the University of Central Lancashire. UCLAN offers a B.Sc degree in homeopathy which is not a regulated profession in England. Prof Colquhoun, sceptical of claims that homeopathy is a science, requested copiesof learning materials from the homeopathy courses from UCLAN. The university refused and Information Commission ruled in Prof Colquhoun’s favour, that ruling was appealed to the tribunal which refused the appeal, and ordered that the information be disclosed.

I am not going to discuss the intricacies of the tribunal’s reasoning, or its place in access to information jurisprudence. There is a summary discussion of the ruling by the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

UCLAN argued that it has a commercial interest in its learning materials, and that disclosure would harm those interests. The tribunal agreed that UCLAN has an interest but found that disclosure would not substantially harm those interests, and that they would be outweighed by the public interest in diclosure

Implications for Creative Commons Non Commercial Licences

Does this ruling have a bearing on the incorporation of Creative Commons Non Commercial licensed material in learning a materials? Although the ruling is that universities have a commercial interest in their learning materials this interest is not necessarily best served by non publication of the materials. The tribunal held”

“Whilst there may be dangers in equating university competition for students with competition within the professions, we note that accountants, solicitors and barristers` chambers, for marketing purposes, routinely publicise without charge the fruits of their experience and professed expertise in the shape of articles, seminars and web – based instruction. Ms. Proops ` argument that UCLAN undervalues the commercial advantages of publishing its wares has some force, we conclude.”

In other words the commercial interest which the tribunal found may be identified with the right to publish the material free as much as it might be with the right to charge for access to the material. The ruling can does not clarify what constitutes “commercial use” because commercial interests may served by free publication as much as by charging for access.

Rather by suggesting that universities are engaging in commercial activities which include their use of learning materials in some way the ruling further complicates the analysis of whether  use is commercial or not. I have suggested  on this blog that the difficulties of deciding whether a particular use is “non commcercial” or not can best  be resolved by adopting a definition of commercial use as actual transactional use; “selling the work, letting the work, including the work in a paid for advertisement or work for hire”. I am willing to be persuaded differently but haven’t seen a compelling arguement, or much arguement at all, to the contrary.

Parting Thought:

If universities are commercial entities like banks, then they should be subsidised, like banks, instead of being starved of funds, like public institutions.

It is the potential of this recursive process; an open process to sustain open processes which gets my attention. Can the forces of enclosure use the open process against the commons? Or are open processes themselves the best protection against enclosure? Openness is always under attack, I am grateful that there are initiatives like Drumbeat to keep the internet open.

Why the 1st of January? For musical, literary and artistic creations (what copyright law calls ‘works’) the term of copyright in South Africa is the life of the author plus fifty years. The fifty years is actually a bit more than than fifty years, because it ends at the end of the year on which the author died. As a result, the 1st of January every year is the day on which new works enter the public domain, or least should enter the public domain if copyright terms are not extended again.

How it works is this. If an author died during 1959 then in South Africa, that author’s works enter the public domain in South Africa. It doesn’t matter whether that author wrote in an another country which has retrospectively extended the copyright term, such as Germany, in South Africa you are free to copy, change and distribute the entire work.

If an author died before 1959 then her work is already in the public domain. If the author died after 1959 or is still alive then the work is still in copyright, unless the work was published pseudonymously or anonymously and the author’s actual identity was not revealed, in which case the copyright expired after fifty years. For photographs, sound recordings, films and computer programs copyright expires after fifty years.

Wallace MacLean identifies an interesting mix of works which entered the public domain yesterday including: “Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens; Anglo-American novelist Raymond Chandler; British sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein; and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright”.

Although some of those authors are from the United States their work will not become available to their countrymen today. Prof James Boyle of Duke explains: “What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019.”

This is because lobbyists in the United States were able to persuade Congress to retrospectively extend the term of copyright. Since then those extensions have been vigorously exported to the rest of the world. South Africa however resisted pressure to extend copyright and as a result did not enter into a so called “Free Trade Agreement” with the United States.

As a result we have new work enriching the public domain.

Some South African artists who died in 1959 whose work now enriches the public domain:

Artists:

Cyril  Manganyi, Nicolaas Martitz, Keith Calder, Jane Alexander, George  Velapi Mazimba, Jacobus Kloppers, Moses Tladi

Authors: Lionel Forman (You Can Hang for Treason)

Architects: David Strachan Haddon

The first Prime Minster of “Grand Apartheid”  D F Malan also died in 1959, and his book “Afrikaner Volkseenheid en my ervaringe op die pad daarheen” is now in the public domain. While this may not seem cause for celebration it is necesary for democracies to be able to freely discuss ideas, even or perhaps especially of those who constitute themselves as enemies of democracy.

If you are aware of any other South African artists, musicians, architects and authors who died in 1959 please list them in the comments.

(1) Use a hashtag so that others can search the tag and see tweets about the process other than oneself.

(2)Remind followers to search the hash tag to get a fuller picture.

(3) Tweet links to background documents, relevant websites and other resources that will enable people to make

(4) Invite questions about the process people following the proceedings. If you can pose questions to speakers all the better but even if not, an offer to clarify can change the conversation.

Some three years ago pioneers of social innovation in South Africa, excited about access to knowledge, openness and the knowledge commons were struggling with the default setting of closed in policies, laws and minds. People seeking to radically change education, scholarly communication, innovation, publishing and standards in South Africa encountered Intellectual Property law as an obstruction. Intellectual Property law is complex, technical and in many cases unclear. Laws are blunt instruments, Intellectual Property laws are among the bluntest, but the effects on positive social change are often diffuse.  Terms like “Intellectual Property” and “Access to Knowledge” can seem abstract. But the issue is simple, often brutally simple. How do we get books in the hands of kids so that they can learn, data to scientists so that they can cure diseases, and knowledge to entrepreneurs so that they can create new products? How can engineers, teachers, techies and social entrepreneurs navigate around the obstruction?

Presciently Helen Turvey hired me not only to help open projects as they grappled with intellectual property issues but also to identify the major systematic challenges to open presented by intellectual property law and opportunities to change it. I became, in the words of my good friend Philipp Schmidt “chief counsel for the open movement in South Africa”.

The team at the Shuttleworth Foundation reckon that good change happens faster if we can first change default settings of closed to open. Often the default is set by to closed by intellectual property; law but also by intellectual property policy and practises.

During the first two years we learned that if we were familiar with the shape of problems, and the solutions which had been tried that we were prepared, so that when conditions changed and presented an opportunity we could act quickly. We learned to take advantage of existing processes for policy advocacy, as well as devising longer processes for systemic change. We acted as a resource to others so that they could move faster and challenge the barriers in their own spheres.

After nearly three years the social innovation space in South Africa is moving towards openness. Although I haven’t achieved all that I’d liked to in the time, thanks to the support of colleagues, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and our partners we’ve given shape to desirable reforms, mapped major obstacles, neutralised some dangers and helped a lot of projects. There are now many more people working in this space who know how to navigate around the hazards of Intellectual Property.

Sharing ideas and experiences was always central to my work but during 2009 I concentrated on turning our previous efforts, and learnings into resources that others can use in the future. This has resulted in two initiatives: Copyright for Educators, and an analysis of access to knowledge efforts in South Africa.

Copyright for Educators is an open, scenario based, course which incorporates many of the lessons we’ve learned from grappling with copyright issues in learning environments. Copyright for Educators was one of the anchor course of the Peer to Peer University pilot. One of the participants was able to get credit for the course as independent study in his Instructional Technology PhD. His assessment of the first iteration of the course was: “for a first pass, I felt the organization of the Copyright for Educators course was very good. The content was interesting and to the point.”

The most challenging issue which the course deals with is the inclusion of copyright works used under exceptions, like fair use, in materials that are under open licences. For example someone might use a photograph under an educational exception in an instruction module that is under a Creative Commons licence. I first raised this issue in a Shuttleworth Foundation issue paper, which subsequently became a chapter in a book: Implementing the World Intellectual Property Agenda (available for free download). The issue has been taken up by ccLearn, the people at Creative Commons focused on open education, who’ve developed a report “Otherwise Open” and recommendations for educators.

There have been a wide range of approaches to increasing access to knowledge in South Africa, but no single record of the different approaches. During 2009 I was able to organise many of the activists, scholars and entrepreneurs to contribute to research on the different approaches and projects, and to have it published as part of the Yale Access to Knowledge Research Series. It examines the battle for open standards, the Foundation’s intervention into the Pearson publishing mergers, the Free High School Science Texts project, and the work of partner projects such the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge project, and the Opening Scholarship project at the University of Cape Town.

I had the opportunity to contribute a great deal to the Foundation’s Open Resources policy. The policy and the thinking behind it were featured as cutting edge in a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing, Policies, Practices and Opportunities.

South Africa still has a long way to go towards an open knowledge society, the kind of society in which networks of links, code and content are open at every level. But there is now movement towards open as a default setting. There is growing agreement that access to knowledge is a basic issue, important to everyone.

When the World Intellectual Property Organisation Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meets from 14 to 18 December 2009 a possible treaty on exceptions and limitations to copyright for visually impaired persons will be on the agenda.

Countries participating in the WIPO meeting are considering the Proposal by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay, relating to limitations and exceptions: Treaty proposed by the World Blind Union (WBU) at the Copyright Committee of the World Intellectual Property Organisation on May 25, 2009.

What are the legal considerations from a South African perspective of the proposed exceptions and limitations?

How would the treaty proposal interact with existing South African law?

The most important law in South Africa is the Constitution which is the supreme law. South African supreme law requires that visually impaired persons should not be discriminated against on the grounds of their impairment (section 8 of the Bill of Rights). The South African government is obliged not only to prohibit such discrimination but take positive steps to ensure that visually impaired persons enjoy the progressive realisation of their rights to education (section 29) and access to information (sections 16 and 32). The progressive realisation of these fundamental rights is currently constrained by dual limitations on the adaptation of material for the needs of visually impaired persons.
Firstly the current Copyright Act, drafted decades before the advent of democratic government, forbids the South African government from simply adapting materials to serve the needs of visually impaired citizens. Secondly even if permission is obtained for ta particular he adaptation of a particular work then that work must be adapted in South Africa, even if it has been adapted elsewhere. Adaptation is costly, so the duplication of adaptation efforts is grossly ineffecient.

The proposed minimum exceptions and limitations offer a solution to the problem created by legislation passed by the previous non-democratic state which limits the rights of visually impaired South Africans in an unconstitutional way. As a result amending South African copyright law in line with the proposed Treaty to enable visually impaired persons to exercise their rights to education, and information is not just desirable but required by the supreme law, the Constitution. The proposed Treaty will assist to make exceptions and limitations in South African legislation for visually impaired persons much more effective because it will address the second factor, the restrictions on the import of materials adapted for visually impaired persons, by permitting materials adapted in countries with relatively more resources to be shared in South Africa. The Treaty is in harmony with the supreme law of South Africa, the Constitution 106 of 1996.

How will the treaty proposal interact with existing international obligations of South Africa?

Like all sovereign nations South Africa is entitled to agree with other sovereign nations to vary its existing obligations in terms of international law. Although a possibility for South Africa this is not necessary in the case of the proposed Treaty which intends to harmonise minimum exceptions for visually impaired persons. Minimum exceptions for visually impaired persons fit into the types exceptions guaranteed to countries by the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property.

What are the possible benefits of or concerns about the treaty proposal, including with regard to the objectives of the treaty proposal, how those objectives could lead to improved access for the blind and visually impaired, and any concerns about the implementation of the proposed treaty provisions in South Africa or abroad?

A major concern is that the overbroad provisions of the proposed enforcement treaty (ACTA) currently being written without the participation of South Africa and most developing countries will make cross border transfer of materials adapted for visually impaired persons into criminal offences. Apparently even though South Africa and most developed countries are not permitted to be party to the ACTA planning it is intended to be unilaterally imposed on South Africa and other developing countries. Unfortunately its impossible to engage in deeper analysis the likely negative impact of that treaty on the rights of visually impaired persons since it is being negotiated in secret.

Globally far too few resources are available to address the needs of visually impaired persons. Currently those resources are being wasted, as each effort to adapt material for visually impaired persons whether permitted by national exceptions or through voluntary arrangements is confined to a specific country. Thus in each country resources may be devoted to adapting a work even though it has already been adapted in many other countries. The Treaty will enable the creation of global systems which enable efficient use of the limited resources.

What other possible courses of action would facilitate access by blind, visually impaired, and other reading disabled persons?

One alternative proposal that has been suggested is that publishing industry, by which is mean the three or four incumbent multinationals which dominate the global publishing industry enter into some sort of voluntary agreement between them and the representatives of the visually impaired to enable theblind. However recent technological and consequent economic changes put the continued viability of the publishing industry in question, so a voluntary agreement may not be a long or even medium term solution. A voluntary undertaking by incumbent publishers will also not give access to orphan works. Orphan works are copyright works that are inaccessible because permission cannot be obtained because the rights holders cannot be located, and possibly no longer exist.

Minimum exceptions are thus necessary to ensure that visually impaired persons have access in a technology neutral way which operates in all environments, and without requiring the consent of any information intermediaries whether search engines, internet service providers or other intermediaries. Only a treaty which creates legal rights will ensure that visually impaired persons get access to knowledge not matter what happens technologically or economically.

Legal opinions and reviews for other jurisdictions are hosted at a US government site.

One can’t help feeling that there is an unfolding order, p2pu has the potential to bring down the barriers which prevent most of the young people in the world from aspiring to tertiary education.

Appropriately we are using a face to face peer learning strategy, without hierarchy and expert presentations, instead lots of interaction, brainstorming and consensus seeking. Its not over, we are meeting again this afternoon, but its a useful moment to reflect on the workshop.

The genesis of p2pu is open education track at the 2007 iSummit held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The conversation that began there culminated in the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education but it didn’t end there. One the ideas generated has emerged into the peer to peer learning initiative we call p2pu, thanks to the vision and hard work of Philipp Schmidt .

Thanks also to the contributions of a team of incredibly creative, self motivated volunteers. Last night we met up with some of the people involved in Open Everything Berlin, very edgy, energetic people. But they think that we are even edgier.

Readers of this blog kindly made suggestions for an online course on copyright for educators.
The first iteration of the course was run through the Peer to Peer University project.

One of the participants, Tom Caswell has blogged on his early reflections on participating in Copyright for Educators. Thanks Tom, this kind of feedback is very useful in any iterative process, and the p2pu concept is most definitely iterative.