0.21 Recommendations  (Page 3/11)

Laws, policies, and conventions surrounding copyright and privacy are an implicit part of thecyberinfrastructure in the social sciences and humanities. We must align current law with the new realities of digital knowledgeenvironments. Laws that support these knowledge environments must take into account the characteristics of digital content and thepractices that make that content productive. The recent effort of the Copyright Office to address the problem of “orphan works”—workswith uncertain copyright status, which therefore cannot be used with impunity by scholars and others—is a welcome example of a keyagency in this debate taking an appropriate leadership role.

The Commission can offer no simple solutions to complex issues of intellectual property. Scholars, after all,create as well as use intellectual property and so are on both sides of these contentious debates. But researchers havetraditionally embraced openness and sharing, and that spirit should be encouraged and facilitated in the digital environment. Theyshould not be intimidated by the efforts of rights holders to restrict valid educational uses of materials. Scholars should, forexample, be encouraged to take full advantage of the “fair use” provisions of the copyright laws.

While scholars advocate public and legal policies of openness and access, they similarly must advocate thesepolicies within their own communities to the greatest extent practically and legally possible. The Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology’s Open CourseWare is an interesting and instructive example at the level of the core instructional activities offaculty: it freely distributes course materials. Universities need to consider the impact of their technology transfer andintellectual property policies; university presses and scholarly societies need to envision creative dissemination models thatreflect academic values, and then lobby for the actual resources needed to realize those models; museums need to make theirdigitized surrogates freely available, as they already increasingly do. All parties should work energetically to ensure thatscholarship and cultural heritage materials are accessible to all—from a student preparing a high-school project to a parenttrying to understand the issues in a school-board debate to a tourist wanting to understand Rome’s art and architecture.

3.promote cooperation between the public and private sectors.

Addressed to: Universities; federal and private funding agencies; Internet-oriented companies

Implementation: A private foundation, a federal funding agency, an Internet business, and one or moreuniversity partners should cosponsor recurring annual summits to explore new models for commercial/nonprofit partnerships and todiscuss opportunities for the focused creation of digital resources with high educational value and high public impact.