If Patents Are So Valuable Why Does IBM's Intellectual Property Revenue Continue To Decline; Forbes, 1/19/16

Chuck Jones, Forbes; If Patents Are So Valuable Why Does IBM's Intellectual Property Revenue Continue To Decline:

"IBM was awarded 7,355 patents in 2015 which was the 23rd year in a row it has received the most patents. Over 2,000 of last year’s patents were related to cognitive computing and the company’s cloud platform. Over the 23 years IBM has received over 88,000 patents and I would estimate they have generated about $20 billion or more of IP (intellectual property) related revenue.

While the value of patents isn’t calculated just by the revenue they generate, it is interesting to see how IBM is doing with this financial line item. Between 2008 and 2012 IBM’s patent portfolio generated between $1.1 and $1.2 billion per year. It has fallen each year since then to $742 million in 2014 and could fall again in 2015 to under $700 million."

US Copyright Office is taking comments about how well the DMCA is working; ArsTechnica.com, 1/6/16

Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica.com; US Copyright Office is taking comments about how well the DMCA is working:

"If you're feeling down about the DMCA this winter—or feeling just skippy about it—there's a government agency that wants to hear from you. On December 31, the US Copyright Office said it intends to take public comments about the effectiveness of the DMCA and its "safe harbor" provisions.

The comments will be part of a "public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions" of the DMCA. Questions that the office wants to consider include:...

There are 30 numbered questions in all (but there's no requirement to address every point.) The questions and other information about the study are listed in the Federal Register notice.

Specific instructions on how to submit the comments will be posted by February 1 on the Copyright Office website, and comments are due by March 21. While a comment to the Copyright Office is a long way from influencing policy, the discussion could be interesting. Many of those on the receiving end of DMCA notices tend to think it's a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to the problem, while content owners concerned about piracy have long held that the DMCA is too burdensome on them."

What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us; New York Times, 1/22/16

Joe Karaganis and David McClure, New York Times; What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us:

"COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear.

Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.

Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.

This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history."

Celebrating Copyright Week with a Theatrical Copyright Revue; Public Knowledge, 1/20/16

Meredith Filak Rose, Public Knowledge; Celebrating Copyright Week with a Theatrical Copyright Revue:

"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, copyright allies are taking on different elements of the law, addressing what's at stake, and discussing what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Happy Copyright Week! To celebrate, I’m looking back on all the exciting copyright cases that have occurred since last year’s Copyright Week, with courts and the music industry alike tackling everything from uncredited sampling to fair use dancing babies. I’ve rounded up some of the highlights of the year’s upheaval, and took the liberty of suggesting a few edits to reflect the changing times. (And yes, that does mean I’ll be reviewing landmark music copyright cases via lyrical skits.)"

Copyright Week; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Copyright Week

Open Access Movement Demands More: 2015 in Review; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 1/2/16

Elliot Harmon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Open Access Movement Demands More: 2015 in Review:

"In October 2015, all six editors of the linguistics journal Lingua quit at once, along with its 31-member editorial board. The walkout brought mainstream attention to a debate that has been brewing for years over the future of academic publishing.

Elsevier—Lingua’s publisher—classifies it as a hybrid journal. By default, Lingua is available only to subscribers (or to institutions that purchase access to journals in bulk). Individual writers can choose to have their articles shared openly if they pay an additional fee. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with those fees—most major open journals have article processing charges, as do many closed journals. But Lingua’s editors believed that their journal’s fee was prohibitively high and didn’t correspond to increased support from Elsevier. The same team is planning to launch a new journal next year with the growing open access publisher Ubiquity Press.

In a lot of ways, what happened at Lingua is emblematic of something that’s been happening all year. If 2014 was the year that the open access movement became mainstream, then this is the year we stopped compromising with closed publishers.

One of the biggest tactics the open access movement can use to effect change is encouraging research funders to adopt open access policies—that is, policies that require that any work they fund be shared openly. Creative Commons reports that in 2015, five major foundations adopted policies requiring any research they fund to be published under an open license: the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Vancouver Foundation."

Dutch lead European push to flip journals to open access; Nature, 1/6/16

Declan Butler, Nature; Dutch lead European push to flip journals to open access:

"The Netherlands is leading what it hopes will be a pan-European effort in 2016 to push scholarly publishers towards open-access (OA) business models: making more papers free for all users as soon as they are published.

In 2014, publishers worldwide made 17% of new papers OA immediately on publication, up from 12% in 2011 (see ‘Growth of open access’). But most papers are still locked behind paywalls when they are first published. The Dutch government, which took over the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union council of ministers this month, has declared furthering OA to be one of its top priorities...

A major driving force for the Dutch and British deals was to combat the expensive and controversial ‘hybrid’ business models that have been adopted by many subscription journals worldwide. Hybrid journals collect subscriptions but allow authors to make individual papers open for a fee. They charge higher fees, on average, than do fully OA journals, yet scientists who want OA papers often choose to publish with them because they are generally more established or prestigious than many recently launched OA journals."