Education

Claire Polster, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Regina

a talk prepared for the October, 2006, conference sponsored by the
Canadian Association of University Teachers,
“Controlling Intellectual Property – The Academic Community and the Future of Knowledge”

I had a lot of difficulty deciding how to approach my talk for today. After much grappling, I realized that some of the difficulty stemmed from my interpretation of how this talk was framed for me by the conference organizers. As you can see in the program, I was asked to talk about "alternatives" to private ownership or to the privatization of academic knowledge. I understood - and still understand - the term "alternatives" to mean other things that we can do besides privatization, other options or choices that we might make either to limit it or to mitigate its harmful effects. The problem for me with the question of alternatives is that it can implicitly suggest and accept that privatization is here to stay. It asks what can we do in addition to it or instead of it, rather than what we can do to directly oppose it. Today, rather than advocating various alternatives to the university's involvement in intellectual property, I want to make the case for directly opposing it. After presenting my case to you, I will defend it by critiquing a number of alternatives that have been put forward by others.

Meera Nair (Doctoral Student)
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
The Commons Conference Presentation, June 2006

On 20 June 2005 the Federal Government of Canada unveiled Bill C-60, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, ostensibly necessary to modernize copyright for the digital age. The discourse that preceded the tabling of this bill showed a clear bias to extend the depth and breadth of copyright, at the expense of the public’s right to access creative endeavour. In this paper I examine the issue of educational licensing of the Internet. A contentious matter, it was removed from Bill C-60 but appears poised* to return. As Canada sits at the policy crossroads, it would be prudent to draw attention to the environment of the proposal at its inception, rather than be critical after implementation.

Creative endeavor implicitly relies on cultural borrowings—as Northrop Frye wrote, “Poetry can only be made out of other poems, novels out of other novels ….” The source of these borrowings is often identified as an intellectual common—the public domain—where past copyrighted work lies available for public use. What lies unseen is the common within ourselves—our individual creative efforts provide fodder to others, while still protected by copyright. Passage to this common is granted by the current, legitimate, copyright exception of fair dealing. Fair dealing ensures that we reciprocate for our own cultural borrowings, and share accordingly.

Educational licensing, tantamount to commodifying passage to the common within, can only introduce unnecessary fiscal strain to education in Canada and will erode the meaning of fair dealing. A meaning which has been recognized for more than two hundred years; in 1802, in Cary v. Kearsley, Lord Ellenborough said, “[A] man may fairly adopt part of the work of another: he may so make use of another’s labours for the promotion of science, and the benefit of the public.”

Tom Moylan, Social Text, 44 (Autumn-Winter, 1995), 45-59.

"Capitalism's concern with culture is not new. Time-motion studies, the social work tactics of Fordism, and the force of advertising are all instances of the employment of culture for the mechanisms of accumulation."

This preliminary report from the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario discusses, with graphs and statistics, the presence and influence of private commercial interests in Ontario and Canadian schools.

Canadian Dimension magazine (canadiandimension.mb.ca)
September/October 2005 Issue
by permission

In our day, all that seems to remain of the historical struggle between the competing visions of socialism and capitalism, between the collective interest and the individual interest, is the euphemistic “public sector” versus the “private sector.” But while most of the vitality has been drained from this revolutionary residue, some meaning yet remains unspoken, suggesting rival conceptions of society. So, locating our institutions in one or the other of these categories, public or private, carries a larger significance and merits our close attention.

The battle over the ownership of the intellectual property (IP) produced in Canada's universities is going to heat up, particularly if the recommendations of the Expert Panel on the Commercialization of University Research are adopted by government.

Many academics and faculty associations are likely to argue that we, rather than our institutions, are the rightful owners of the knowledge we create. In this brief space, I want to argue strongly against this position. I propose that the academic community instead make the case that neither we nor the institutions in which we work are entitled to own the knowledge we produce, but that all knowledge produced in our universities rightfully belongs to the public. In other words, we should make the case that the university has no business in the intellectual property business in the first place.