March 27-29, 2002
University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan 

The University of Aizu International Affairs Committee 
is pleased to invite participants to the 2nd International Workshop 
on Digital and Academic Liberty of Information. 

"OPEN DIGITAL SOCIETIES and EDUCATION"

"... code is law and you [programmers] are the lawmakers. Now this idea that code is law and that the coders are architecting this space of freedom that we call the Internet, it's lost on most of the lawyers I talk to, on most of the governments that think about cyberspace, but it's most forcefully absent among you who are architecting and building this space of freedom." Architecting Innovation 2001-06-05 Declaring that code is law and programmers are the lawyers in this space, Stanford School of Law Professor, author Lawrence Lessig warns that the fundamental structures that have fostered innovation and creativity on the Internet are now under attack.

OpenCourseWare: Simple Idea, Profound Implications - - - Phillip D. Long

[Excerpt] Courseware as Product: The higher education community has become subject to a new force in recent years. The trend has been referred to as "education as a good" (Schlais, 2001), describing the increasing trend toward the privatization of knowledge. Colleges and universities, in his view, are becoming more and more like vendors to students, who perceive themselves as customers of college education services. During the bloom of online distance education—curtailed only recently by the general economic recession—competition for students among universities led to increasing costs. Revenues were sought to replace declining public subsidies and to support competitive consumerism. Not-for-profit subsidiaries of traditional colleges, for-profit private universities, and corporations emerged, seeking to gain a larger share in what seemed an infinitely expanding demand for anywhere, anytime learning.

The privatization of knowledge has many manifestations. One is the frightening rise in the cost of scholarly journals. The pattern is familiar to anyone working in the academy. Schlais describes the conundrum like this: "A faculty member spends years of her life learning, researching, thinking, organizing, teaching, and writing. Her university invests substantially during this process. She publishes the fruits of her labor in a highly respected journal. And finally her library buys a subscription to the journal, sometimes costing in the tens of thousands of dollars per year." Something is amiss, and our library colleagues have been painfully aware of it for years.

Copyright and legal interpretations deepen the concern. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the General Agreement on Trade in Services, education is an international commodity. In the United States, compliance with the WTO agreements was accomplished in part by the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Jessica Litman described the relevance of these changes in her book, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (2001):

"1. The use of digital works, including viewing, reading, listening, transporting, etc., requires a reproduction of the original of the work in a computer’s memory.
2. Copyright statutes give clear and exclusive control over reproduction (as defined above) to the copyright holder.
3. For each use of the copyrighted material, that is, each viewing, listening, transfer, the user needs to have the statutory privilege of the copyright holder."

Faculty members at MIT, as well as other universities, are concerned that their intellectual property may be locked away from their peers, as well as potential students, behind proprietary barriers. Participating in OCW (OpenCourseWare) is a proactive statement that "reflects the idea that, as scholars and teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our research and teaching" (Miyagawa, 2001). As Vest noted, "OpenCourseWare looks counterintuitive in a market-driven world." Indeed.