The ivory towers are crumbling

Intellectual property is a strange and difficult concept. It's also increasingly anachronistic. The Law journal has this definition of IP: "Intellectual property (IP) is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which property rights are recognised - and the corresponding fields of law". Some academics are aggressively protective of their so called intellectual property and many others jealously guard their course notes, slides, and other content. When their work is published, authors sign a contract which means that the publisher then holds the copyright of the material, and can sue anyone who infringes that copyright. In essence, they are 'protecting' the content of the academic, whilst at the same time making a lot of money out of it.

A blog post I read recently reported that one US professor is now considering preventing his students from making notes during his lectures, because this action infringes his intellectual property! How ridiculous. What do their course fees entitle them to then? A glimpse of him on the stage every so often and the chance to sit occasionally at his feet to hear the pearls of wisdom? It never ceases to amaze me how arrogant and remote some academics can make themselves. Fortunately, most of those I encounter are open, generous and eager to share their ideas with anyone who is interested. And that is where the social media come in. Increasingly academics are making their ideas freely available on blogs, social networks and other sharing sites. Don't misundertand me. I'm not against intellectual property. People are entitled to be acknowledged for their contribution to knowledge. What I am opposed to is the idea that knowledge can be traded as a commodity. Times are changing and the foundations of the ivory towers are being eroded. Here are just some of the movements that are threatening to destabilise them and open up higher education for all:

I have already enthused several times in the last year about online publishing and open scholarship, so I won't labour those points here again. I will say this though: Online and open access journals are gaining ground, and just about anything that has ever been published is now out there somewhere and available if you search long enough and smart enough for it. What will this mean to the arrogant, protectionist academics who jealously guard their ideas? Copyleft is another movement that is threatening to bring down the ivory towers of the academic world. In effect it finds ways to enable readers to adapt and otherwise modify existing works without infringing copyright law. Some academics won't like that very much. Another threat is Creative Commons which has an entire range of licencing agreements which variously enable users to modify, extend and share versions of the original work. Does this offer a threat to IP? For the purists, of course it does. Finally, Google Books, Scholar and other web based services are undermining the foundations of the elite knowledge brokers.

The bottom line is this: If students find that an important text is protected, or even closed off, due to copyright restrictions (or even, perish the thought, pay walls), they will simply go elsewhere. It will be a fitting epitaph for the ivory tower brigade, that they are increasingly irrelevant in a modern, web enabled academic world, whilst the stars of the show will be those scholars who openly share their work, and who will listen to feedback. IP is not threatened. Academics will still own their ideas. What is threatened is the protectionist, exclusionist ideology that has prevailed for so long in the learned society. What is threatened is the idea that knowledge should ever have been made into a commodity. We may yet see the ivory towers come crashing down.

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The ivory towers are crumbling by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.