Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 4 Number 4 2006

CONTENTS

[click on author's name for abstract and full text]
 

Theme: Copyrights and Patents: issues and ethics for education
Guest Editor: CUSHLA KAPITZKE

Cushla Kapitzke. Editorial. Copyrights and Patents: issues and ethics for education, pages 330‑333 doi:10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.330 VIEW FULL TEXT
Richard M. Stallman. Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage, pages 334‑336
Shun-ling Chen. Freedom as in a Self-sustainable Community: the free software movement and its challenge to copyright law, pages 337‑347
John Willinsky. The Properties of Locke’s Common-wealth of Learning, pages 348‑365
Scott Kiel-Chisholm & Brian Fitzgerald. The Rise of Open Access in the Creative, Educational and Science Commons, pages 366‑379
David Rooney, Bernard McKenna & Thomas Keenan. Copyright and Cultural Production: a knowledge and wisdom theory perspective on education policy, pages 380‑395
Ruth Rikowski. A Marxist Analysis of the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, pages 396‑409
Shujen Wang. Breaks, Flows, and Other In-between Spaces: rethinking piracy and copyright governance, pages 410‑420
Gordon Chalmers. Aboriginal Knowledges in the Australian Market Place: different issue, same story, pages 421‑430
Cushla Kapitzke. Intellectual Property Rights: governing cultural and educational futures, pages 431‑445

INTERVIEW VIEW FULL TEXT
Cultural Policy and Copyright: implications for education. A Conversation with Siva Vaidhyanathan, pages 446‑453 doi:10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.446

BOOK REVIEWS VIEW FULL TEXT
Globalisation, Information and Libraries: the implications of the World Trade Organisation’s GATS and TRIPS Agreements (Ruth Rikowski) reviewed by Cushla Kapitzke, pages 454‑457
Education, Equality and Human Rights, 2nd Edn (Mike Cole) reviewed by Renee DePalma, pages 457‑458 doi:10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.457

Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage

RICHARD M. STALLMAN Free Software Foundation, Boston, USA

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.334

The term ‘intellectual property’ tends to warp thinking wherever it is used. It carries a bias in favor of dealing with a variety of issues as kinds of ‘property’; even worse, applying the term to various disparate issues focuses attention erroneously on the little that they have in common. The term should never be used, and we should not let others lead us into using it.

Freedom as in a Self-sustainable Community: the Free Software Movement and its challenge to copyright law

SHUN-LING CHEN Harvard Law School, USA

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.337

Copyright law, together with the market logic it carries, penetrates deeply into our daily life. The copyright regime is so restrictive that it turns a normal learning process into a series of potential copyright violations. The Free Software Movement (FSM) represents a substantial community effort to counter this trend. It seeks to supersede the copyright regime by offering the ‘Copyleft’ licensing mode, which facilitates the formation of a cooperative, resource-sharing community. The FSM has been so successful that it has challenged the utilitarian values presumed in copyright law, has fuelled widespread reassessment of copyright law, and has influenced many who engage in various creative activities. Claiming to bear similar values, Creative Commons (CC) provides licensing models for people to waive some rights granted to them. However, CC differs from the FSM in significant ways. Most notably, the flexible CC licensing model weakens the firm philosophical and political ground which binds FSM advocates together. Hence, although CC’s rapid growth seems to signal its success, it is questionable whether such success is as enduring as the FSM’s, or if it is leading to a different result. While CC champions the author’s freedom to decide how to use his or her bundle of property rights granted by copyright law, the FSM advocates the freedom to build and live in an alternative, vital and self-sustaining community. The existence of such an alternative model not only allows these particular participants to be independent from the proprietary world, but also may empower the rest of society to imagine different kinds of relationships between human beings and their creative activities.

The Properties of Locke’s Common-wealth of Learning

JOHN WILLINKSY University of British Columbia, Canada

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.348

This article reads the educational implications of ‘intellectual property’ that are found in the double meaning of property, as the word refers to an economic right and a quality of being. It briefly visits the seventeenth-century origins of this double concept of intellectual property (IP), with particular attention paid to John Locke (who provides the basis of IP as a personal possession as well as furthering the idea of a ‘common-wealth of learning’) and the emergence of ‘open science’. The argument proceeds on two levels, educational and public, as it draws parallels between the way that students are taught to regard learning and the way in which a knowledge-based global economy treats learning. On the first level, that of the personal, the article puts forward a critique of the common educational tendency to treat learning as a private good, in terms of personal asset management, which ultimately undermines the common-wealth of learning and the idea of knowledge as a public good. On the second level, that of the public sphere, the article turns to the increasing privatization and capitalization of knowledge that is making inroads into the common-wealth of learning, particularly around publicly funded research and scholarship. The article considers the prospects, finally, of ‘open’ responses (e.g. open access, open source, etc.) to reassert the vital role of the common-wealth, through new technologies of knowledge sharing, and it considers the educational policy implications of preparing a new generation of students who, as they are prepared to participate in knowledge-based economies, should also understand the implications of sustaining the common-wealth of learning.

The Rise of Open Access in the Creative, Educational and Science Commons

SCOTT KIEL-CHISHOLM & BRIAN FITZGERALD Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.366

Management of intellectual property and, in particular, copyright is one of the most challenging issues in an increasingly digital world. The rise of the open access (OA) movement provides a new model for managing intellectual property in educational and research environments. OA aims to promote greater and more efficient access to educational and research materials and has an international profile. This article overviews the basic charter of OA and explain how it proposes to transform academic communication and publishing in an online world. Importantly, this article also overviews the legal issues that surround the move towards OA and the concept of open content licensing (including the Creative Commons Project).

Copyright and Cultural Production: a knowledge and wisdom theory perspective on education policy

DAVID ROONEY, BERNARD MCKENNA & THOMAS KEENAN University of Queensland, Australia

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.380

This article addresses concerns about the role of education policy in the context of knowledge-related public policy. Specifically, it raises concerns about how the technocratic and anti-social tendencies already observed in knowledge-related policy discourse may adversely influence the intellectual and cultural life of communities. A key goal of this article, then, is to stimulate debate about how we might, through education policy, slow the relentless and socially impoverishing drive towards a more commercially and technologically centred society; a society that is savant-like in its technical capacities yet fails to measure up on basic social and cultural imperatives such as the pursuit of knowledge and cultural expression for their own sakes. The article draws on two complementary theories, the relational theory of knowledge and the balance theory of wisdom, to set out a novel framework for deciding what the goals of education in a knowledge society might be. Finally, the article will make a case study of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2003 Education Policy Analysis document to demonstrate how this relational and balance theory of knowledge can be used to evaluate and improve education policy for its contribution to achieving a knowledge society.

A Marxist Analysis of the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

RUTH RIKOWSKI London South Bank University, United Kingdom

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.396

This article examines the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). There are many WTO Agreements, but TRIPS is likely to have significant implications for areas such as information, education and libraries. The article provides an overview of TRIPS in general. Various intellectual property rights (IPRs) are covered in TRIPS, including copyright, patents, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, integrated circuit designs and ‘trade secrets’. It then considers the implications of TRIPS for information provision, focusing in particular on copyright and patents. Finally, it examines the TRIPS within an Open Marxist theoretical perspective. The author argues that TRIPS is fundamentally about transforming IPRs into internationally tradable commodities. Marx began his analysis of capitalism in Capital volume one with ‘the commodity’. We need to get back to basic Marxism and to make it applicable to the global capitalist world that we find ourselves in today. Thus, capitalism is essentially about the commodification of all that surrounds us and the TRIPS assists with this process. Value that is extracted from labour, and largely from intellectual labour, becomes embedded in internationally tradable commodities (such as patents) that are created and socially validated by TRIPS. Profit is derived from this value and through this process global capitalism is extended and intensified.

Breaks, Flows, and Other In-between Spaces: rethinking piracy and copyright governance

SHUJEN WANG Emerson College, Boston, USA

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.410

This article uses three case studies to examine the intersecting developments of technology, capitalism, and globalization through the contradictions and paradoxes of copyright governance and piracy. China is used as a case study to investigate the relations among the state, law, and global capitalism.

Aboriginal Knowledges in the Australian Market Place: different issue, same story

GORDON CHALMERS

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.421

With Indigenous knowledges being increasingly available via different media, there is the risk of these knowledges becoming disengaged from the peoples who imparted them. A consequence of this disengagement is that it creates the conditions for the creation and perpetuation of misunderstanding and misuse of Indigenous peoples’ lifeworlds. This article explores issues surrounding tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of disseminating knowledge and it points to areas of possible change whereby the latter may seek to find its processes normalised within the former. In particular, it suggests that an approach to Indigenous knowledges that incorporates many of their original regulatory mechanisms would go a long way towards avoiding both the misunderstanding and misuse of these knowledges. The article draws upon examples from particular Aboriginal groups in the Northern Territory of Australia who, it can be said, have for a long time engaged in this process of ‘Indigenising’ dominant modes of information dissemination and use. In some cases, this process has proven successful but in others it has proven unsuccessful. The reasons for these different outcomes will be explored in regard to the extent to which ‘outsiders’ have personally engaged with the peoples from whom the knowledge was originally imparted and the extent to which the outsiders have themselves Indigenised their own normative Western modes of information use.

Intellectual Property Rights: governing cultural and educational futures

CUSHLA KAPITZKE Queensland University of Technology, Australia

doi: 10.2304/pfie.2006.4.4.431

This article uses Nikolas Rose’s theory of governmentality to examine ways in which intellectual property is imbricated in a broad spectrum of globalised and globalising discourses. Using the 2004 Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement as a case in point, it shows how discourses of culture, trade, foreign policy, and security intersect and potentially restrict access to cultural knowledge and textual resources for young people and educators.

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