Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Think back to the early days of MOOCs. Professors at Stanford and Harvard and other places were suddenly teaching really big classes, free. Hundreds of thousands of students at once were in those courses. It was an unprecedented giveaway of what had traditionally been the most expensive education in the world.

Back then, I met several students who were binging on the courses the way you might binge-watch a season of your favorite show on Netflix. They took as many courses as they possibly could, powering through and finishing as many as 30 courses in a year. When I asked why they were in such a hurry, the most popular reason was that they thought it was all too good to last. As one of those binging students told me, "I’m just afraid this whole thing might end soon." Surely, universities would change their mind about this, or the start-ups working with colleges might lock things up.

Fast forward to last month, when Coursera did something that stirred up all of those concerns again. On June 30 the company deleted hundreds of its earliest courses, as part of a shift to a new software platform. Reaction, as you might expect, was negative on social media and blogs. One programmer called it cultural vandalism...

Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues."

"Jail for Self-Publishing Novels"; Bizarro, 7/16/16

Dan Piraro, Bizzaro:

"Jail for Self-Publishing Novels"

The Fight for the "Right to Repair"; Smithsonian.com, 7/13/16

Emily Matchar, Smithsonian.com; The Fight for the "Right to Repair" :

"The problem, Gordon-Byrne says, began in earnest in the late 1990s. Companies were increasingly embedding software in their products, and claiming that software as their intellectual property. Companies would argue that they needed to control repairs as a way of maintaining security and customer experience, reasons Gordon-Byrne calls “all fake.”...

The problem isn’t limited to traditional home electronics. A farmer may have paid for his or her John Deere tractor, a piece of farm equipment that can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But John Deere still owns the software that runs the tractor, and trying to fix it without going to an authorized repair center could put the farmer afoul of copyright laws. This means that, in order to make legal repairs, a farmer in a rural area might have to haul a broken 15-ton tractor for hundreds of miles to an authorized dealer or repair shop. In the harvest season, this could mean a crushing loss of revenue.

Nor does the problem only harm consumers. Independent repair professionals, from camera shop owners to computer technicians, suffer, saying the lack of access to repair parts and manuals makes them unable to do their jobs."

Pokemon Go spurs lawyers to stop and consider legal issues; ABA Journal, 7/13/16

Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal; Pokemon Go spurs lawyers to stop and consider legal issues:

"Some lawyers say Pokemon Go, an “augmented reality” game, raises legal issues and public safety concerns. Alabama lawyer Keith Lee, writing at his Associate’s Mind blog, says his legal questions include:

Does placing a Pokemon character on a private property, without permission, affect the owner’s interest in exclusive possession of the property? Does it create an attractive nuisance? Does owning real property extend property rights to intellectual property elements that are placed on it? Is there liability for placing the characters on private property or in dangerous locations?

Michigan lawyer Brian Wassom raises other legal issues in a post for the Hollywood Reporter’s THR, Esq. blog. Augmented reality games can lead to competition for the use of the same physical spaces, disrupting the ability of players and nonplayers to enjoy the place, and possibly leading to violence, he says. Could government limit the players in a public space? Would that bring a First Amendment challenge?"

Meet Your New Librarian of Congress; Smithsonian.com, 7/14/16

Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian.com; Meet Your New Librarian of Congress: Carla Hayden will make history as the first African-American in the role—and the first woman:

"In the past, presidential nominations tended to focus on patronage and vague qualifications, and the role did not require that the librarian have served as a professional librarian at any time. Former Librarians of Congress carried out what was, in effect, a lifetime term. As a result, the the institution has only had 13 leaders in its 216-year-long history. That recently changed when Congress passed a bill limiting the term of the Librarian of Congress to 10 years.

Hayden had to undergo a confirmation hearing and political gridlock before being confirmed to the position by a 74-18 vote, McGlone reports. Just what does her post entail? In short, she’ll be responsible for overseeing the nation’s largest cultural institution, but her job will have other perks (and challenges). Not only does the Librarian of Congress name the nation’s Poet Laureate, but she oversees the Copyright Office, makes critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, oversees the National Recording Registry and National Film Registry and serves as the public face of books in the United States.

It’s a tall order—but one that America’s newest Librarian of Congress seems enthused to take on. Hayden tells Fritze that she looks forward to opening “the treasure chest that is the Library of Congress even further and [making] it a place that can be found and used by everyone.”"

Bastille Day Fireworks and Copyright; Trademark & Copyright Law Blog, 7/13/16

Alice Berendes, Trademark & Copyright Law Blog; Bastille Day Fireworks and Copyright:

"When the 100th anniversary of the building of the Eiffel Tower was commemorated, the French Supreme Court, or Cour de Cassation, held (in its Judgment of March 3, 1992, Case No. 90-18081) that a show “consisting of lighting effects of the tower by a combination of ramps and projectors, along with image projections and fireworks” is a work of art protected by copyright. In making this holding, the Court affirmed a lower court’s decision that a publisher cannot sell postcards reproducing photographs of the show without the show designer’s prior authorization.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is a good illustration of how extensive the notion of copyrightable work is under French law. Article 112-1 of the French Intellectual Property Code, states that works are protected by copyright “whatever their kind, form of expression, merit or purpose.”"

‘We’re lucky someone wasn’t killed’: A look at the patent office’s Christmas outage; Fed Scoop, 7/13/16

Whitney Blair Wyckoff, Fed Scoop; ‘We’re lucky someone wasn’t killed’: A look at the patent office’s Christmas outage:

"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s massive data center outage last Christmas was more than just an inconvenience, said the agency’s chief tech exec — it could have been deadly.

“Metal vaporized, doors blown off hinges ... we’re lucky someone wasn’t killed,”John Owens, the chief information officer of the Patent and Trademark Office, said at a Patent Public Advisory Committee meeting in a harrowing account that sounds more like the start of a horror flick than a quarterly update from a CIO’s office.

The result was that many key patent and trademark systems — like those that allow people to file and search for applications — were unavailable for nearly a week. The agency’s IT staff and vendors came in over the Christmas holiday to make fixes and restore service...

...[Tony Cole, vice president and global government CTO at FireEye] said the biggest lesson he hopes the government learns is that it needs to upgrade its IT infrastructure. He touted U.S. CIO Tony Scott's push to create a $3.1 billion IT Modernization Fund, a proposal that he has been trying to sell to Congress. And he also recommended that the government make a stronger push into the cloud."