Browsing by Subject "Intellectual Property"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Copyright or Copyleft? Balancing Image Rights for Artists, Museums and Audiences
    (2013-05-31) Dolen, Jennifer
    Copyright was initially conceived as a bundle of rights of limited duration, designed to benefit society while also protecting the interests of creators. However, as technology and social behaviors have evolved, methods of sharing information no longer fit within copyright’s context. This study examines the issues, with particular focus on the visual arts and images used by arts-related organizations such as museums. Changes that would protect artists while allowing institutions to broadly share images of art works are proposed.
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    Textual curators and writing machines: authorial agency in encyclopedias, print to digital.
    (2009-07) Kennedy, Krista A.
    Wikipedia is often discussed as the first of its kind: the first massively collaborative, Web-based encyclopedia that belongs to the public domain. While it’s true that wiki technology enables large-scale, distributed collaborations in revolutionary ways, the concept of a collaborative encyclopedia is not new, and neither is the idea that private ownership might not apply to such documents. More than 275 years ago, in the preface to the 1728 edition of his Cyclopædia, Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the volumes he was about to publish. His thoughts were remarkably similar to contemporary intellectual property arguments for Wikipedia, and while the composition processes involved in producing these texts are influenced by the available technologies, they are also unexpectedly similar. This dissertation examines issues of authorial agency in these two texts and shows that the “Author Construct” is not static across eras, genres, or textual technologies. In contrast to traditional considerations of the poetic author, the encyclopedic author demonstrates a different form of authorial agency that operates within strict genre conventions and does not place a premium on originality. This and related variations challenge contemporary ideas concerning the divide between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property arguments are without historical precedent.
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    Wrangling Software: computing professionals and the interpretation of software ownership in the University computing environment.
    (2011-02) Cleveland, Lara L.
    This project explores the way information about law is transformed into organizational policies and practices. Existing literature emphasizes the state and organized professional groups as primary interpreters of the law and as creators of legal implementation strategies in the organizational setting. This case study of university responses to software-related intellectual property protections focuses on the role of computing professionals in the creation and implementation of university policies and practices related to software ownership. This case challenges and extends existing research about professional construction of the law by examining a loosely organized profession, computing, and a law for which the state provides little or no regulatory enforcement. This research finds that professional boundary maintenance among computing professionals is difficult in a labor force environment where demand for professionals outpaces the availability of persons to do the work. Professional boundaries remain undefined or fluid, and credentialing efforts fail, in markets for which labor supply cannot meet the demand. However, control over physical machinery serves as an alternative boundary maintenance mechanism within the organization. Managing usage rights, and consequently software ownership permissions, through the digital protections already provided in the software and hardware systems is often justified to `protect users from themselves,' but with consequences for information exchange. Organizational emphasis on data privacy, file sharing, and security compete against pressures toward information openness in the university setting. The closed-machine system of dealing with privacy, security, and consequently ownership, align with the professional boundary maintenance efforts of computing professionals and is reinforced by bureaucratic organizational concerns of the university in desired outcome, if not fully in terms of philosophy or justification. Academic and technological scripts of openness and autonomy present opportunities for computing professionals to broadly interpret the increasingly restrictive policies on who can have full access to computing machinery. Rather than resist closed systems through rule breaking, copying, "stealing," or "piracy," computer professionals resist closed systems through active support of open source technologies, through extra efforts at ensuring interoperability among different computing platforms and programs, and primarily for those computer users who can also be defined as computer experts.