Friday, October 11, 2019

Some follow up to yesterday's class session.

This is the PowerPoint presentation I used

I did a tiny bit of research on duration of Patents and Copyrights in the U.S.  It looks like the patent term is now 20 years, so I was wrong about that.   The copyright term is life of the author plus 70 years.  Note that when the author is doing that work as an employee or as a contractor, the copyright is owned by the hiring company.  Also, it is my experience that companies are very quick to use non-disclosure agreements about anything they deem interesting and innovative.  Given that, you might ask how companies incentivize employees to be innovative. 

I will add here that faculty (not the university) typically own the copyright to their research papers.  Then the normal exchange is to assign the copyright to the publisher when the article has been accepted in a journal within the publisher's sphere.  Before the Internet that was uncontroversial.  Now it is pretty common to find articles that are under copyright made publicly available by somebody other than the publisher.

Regarding another example of change that doesn't improve things, though it is intended to, consider the use of Banner for doing course registering.  Before there wasn't any online system for registering, the phenomenon of course hoarding didn't exist, because to drop a course was an onerous process.  Once that became easy, you have this pernicious development. 

Progress may have excellent benefits for most people, but it also can produce unanticipated side effects.  We should be aware of both.

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