Copyright and "facts": issues in licensing and redistribution for social science data professionals.

While data and statistics have always been the backbone of empirical research, they are now important intellectual property even outside the halls of academia. Everything from the global financial system to shipping gifts for the holidays depends on data: in today's digital world, information and data are crucial commodities. But often there are strings attached to the access, usage and reporting of data, even if the data are "free". Researchers may compile a dataset, but what rights do they have for the use of those data? This paper will outline some of the issues and considerations of which data professionals in the social science need to be aware. Copyright, licensing, redistribution and intellectual property rights are now important issues that data users, and those who support them, need to understand early on in the research process

The disjuncture of learning and recognition: credential assessment from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

To better recognise foreign qualifications, many OECD countries have promoted liberal fairness epitomised by universal standards and institutional efficiency. This paper departs from such a managerial orientation towards recognition. Building on recognitive justice, it proposes an alternative anchoring point for recognition practices: the standpoint or everyday experiences of immigrants. This approach is illustrated with a qualitative study of the credential recognition practices of the engineering profession in Canada. From the standpoint of Chinese immigrants, the study identifies a disjuncture between credential recognition practices and immigrants’ career stage post-migration. Taking this disjuncture as problematic, it further pinpoints recognition issues such as redundancy and arbitrariness, a narrow focus on undergraduate education, and a deficit view of training from other countries. While some of these issues may be addressed by improving administrative procedures, others demand a participatory space allowing immigrants to become partners of assessment, rather than merely its objects. (DIPF/Orig.

Access to Spatial Data: The Political Power of Legal Control Mechanisms

According to the U.S. Supreme Court (Island Trees School District v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 1982), the Constitution presupposes that the free flow of information between the government and the public is essential to maintaining an informed citizenry, which in turn is essential to holding governments accountable. However, local governments are increasingly using various legal mechanisms to limit public access to geographic information (GI), and this in turn can potentially disrupt this balance. Licensing and copyright are two such mechanisms that local government agencies are using to limit GI access and distribution. If information is power, whoever controls information, controls power. Therefore those who influence the political and legal processes that control access to geographic information control power. By using the theoretical frameworks of GIS and Society, Legal and Policy Analysis, Politics of Scale and Neoliberalism, a truly multidisciplinary investigation, new theories of the political nature of knowledge access may be developed. This dissertation is composed of three papers. The first paper examines the growth and development of land records modernization in Wisconsin, and through the lenses of the Critical GIS and political economy, contributes to the body of knowledge within Critical GIS by examining one of the United State\u27s first successful forays into modernizing land records. The paper documents the socially constructed relationship between technology and geography. This historic examination of how one state successfully built a program through years of cooperation and conflicts among powerful actors and networks, at and between scales, during times of plentiful and lean government resources provides insights into issues that still plague data cooperation between groups with different agendas today. The second and third papers focus on the legal and political processes that frame access to geographic information in Wisconsin and California. Through an examination of court cases in California and Wisconsin and the laws that impact GI access, suggested public policy to increase access to this government produced information is suggested. This research will contribute to both the GIS and Society and Legal and Policy analysis literature by documenting the legal and political impacts of GI data sharing

Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer

There has been an enormous upward redistribution of income in the United States in the last four decades. In his most recent book, Baker shows that this upward redistribution was not the result of globalization and the natural workings of the market. Rather it was the result of conscious policies that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers while protecting and enhancing the incomes of those at the top. Baker explains how rules on trade, patents, copyrights, corporate governance, and macroeconomic policy were rigged to make income flow upward

Small Pool for Big Data: Researching for Sustainable Data Focused on Open Government Data (OGD) Movement

When Sir Isaac Newton said his famous statement standing on the shoulders of giants, it was a modest phrase and explained the necessity of sharing knowledge or information to make the next intellectual progress. The data industry is now the fastest developing area, but many ambiguities are a subject in law. The protection of data is a fascinating and still unsolved challenge for intellectual property law. Data is essential in the matter of new industry and our lifestyle at individual, corporate, and institutional levels. And the legal protection needs to work to offer vivid transactions of data for creative interactions. However, many enterprises consider data an asset for business profit as the data industry grows vast and fast. Data raises diverse policy debates that arise in the better-known intellectual property areas, for instance, copyrights, unfair competition, and trade secret. The vague aspects of data implicate a number of intellectual property approaches. It also extends to the economic problem \u27tragedy of anti-commons\u27 that fragmented ownership is disrupting sound usage. In this regard, Open Governmental Data (OGD) is one way to resolve inefficiency in the data industry. The government collects massive personal data and reproduces datasets in the process of administration. Many governments give back the public data for private sectors anticipating the data works for new enterprise seed money. This work looks at three considerations about the legal aspects of data. At first, we will see the necessity of big data in current and reasons for the government to pay attention to open data to the public. The data industry market\u27s inefficiency discourages cumulative innovation in our society and approaches the benefits of sharing data in the private economy or OGD movement. Second, the paper conducts principles of OGD and takes a functional approach in analyzing the related IP laws in database protection and public accessibility. Interestingly various governments are opening data that compares various OGD models from different countries led by other stakeholders, including government, large companies, small to medium enterprises ( SMEs ), and how they work as a member of OGD. Finally, it critiques the current OGD movement and suggests that corporate OGD strategies granting autonomous would help resolve the anti-commons of IP in the big data industry

Decoding the "Free/Open Source(F/OSS) Software Puzzle" a survey of theoretical and empirical contributions

F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased exponentially. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sufficiently comprehensive account of these contributions in order to draw some general conclusions on the state of our understanding of the phenomenon and identify directions for future research. The exercise suggests that what is puzzling about F/OSS is not so much the fact that people freely contribute to a good they make available to all, but rather the complexity of its institutional structure and its ability to organizationally evolve over time.F/OSS software, Innovation, Incentives, Governance, Intellectual Property Rights

The IP Law Book Review, Vol. 2 #2, February 2012

Reviews and Reviewers: JUSTIFYING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, by Robert P. Merges. Reviewed by Amy L. Landers, Pacific McGeorge School of Law. TRADEMARK AND COPYRIGHT LITIGATION: FORMS AND ANALYSIS–VOLUME I: CEASE-AND-DESIST DEMANDS THROUGH ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY, by Mark V.B. Partridge and Phillip Barengolts. Reviewed by Timothy Cahn, Kilpatrick Townsend LLP. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT: THE ROLE OF NGOS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, by Duncan Matthews. Reviewed by Margaret Chon, Seattle University School of Law. PATENTS AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD: LIBER AMICORUM JOSEPH STRAUS, edited by Wolrad Prinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, Martin J. Adelman, Robert Brauneis, Josef Drexl and Ralph Nack. Reviewed by Timo Minssen, Centre for Information and Innovation Law, University of Copenhagen. PROPERTY OUTLAWS: HOW SQUATTERS, PIRATES, AND PROTESTERS IMPROVE THE LAW OF OWNERSHIP, by Eduardo Moisés Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal. Reviewed by Ann Bartow, Pace Law School

Faculty Perceptions of Open Educational Resources in Cyber Curriculum: A Pilot Study

The cyber landscape is growing and evolving at a fast pace. Public and private industries need qualified applicants to protect and defend information systems that drive the digital economy. Currently, there are not enough candidates in the pipeline to fill this need in the workforce. The digital economy is still growing, thus presenting an even greater need for skilled workers in the future. The lack of a strong workforce in cybersecurity presents many challenges to safeguarding U.S. national security and citizens across the world. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. OERs weaken barriers to learning by reducing costs, increasing access, and allowing adaptability of educational materials to meet the needs of an instructor in their field. In this study, the research aims to study cyber faculty members from higher educational institutions in the United States to determine their perceptions of using OER for cyberlearning. A survey instrument from the Babson Survey Research Group was adopted and adapted by the researcher for use in statistical analysis. Individuals from cyber professional organizations, an academic conference, and professional development opportunities in the Summer of 2019 completed the survey to help build the sample for data analysis. The research questions in the study aim to look for statistically significant differences in perceptions of cyber faculty by looking at their years of experience and the number of specialty roles faculty fill in their cyber endeavors. Further understanding of the perceptions of OER by cyber faculty will help understand the roles these educational tools play in tackling the challenges that exist in the cyber landscape

Credit Where It’s Due: The Law and Norms of Attribution

The reputation we develop by receiving credit for the work we do proves to the world the nature of our human capital. If professional reputation were property, it would be the most valuable property that most people own because much human capital is difficult to measure. Although attribution is ubiquitous and important, it is largely unregulated by law. In the absence of law, economic sectors that value attribution have devised non-property regimes founded on social norms to acknowledge and reward employee effort and to attribute responsibility for the success or failure of products and projects. Extant contract-based and norms-based attribution regimes fail optimally to protect attribution interests. This article proposes a new approach to employment contracts designed to shore up the desirable characteristics of existing norms-based attribution systems while allowing legal intervention in cases of market failure. The right to public attribution would be waivable upon proof of a procedurally fair negotiation. The right to attribution necessary to build human capital, however, would be inalienable. Unlike an intellectual property right, attribution rights would not be enforced by restricting access to the misattributed work itself; the only remedy would be for the lost value of human capital. The variation in attribution norms that currently exists in different workplace cultures can and should be preserved through the proposed contract approach. The proposal strikes an appropriate balance between expansive and narrow legal protections for workplace knowledge and, in that respect, addresses one of the most vexing current debates at the intersection of intellectual property and employment law

Critical issues associated with adoption and use of open source software in public sector: insights from Tanzania

Two Open Source Software (OSS) projects in Tanzania are discussed as exemplar efforts for the adaptation and use of OSS in public sector. The projects investigated in this Action Research Study were from the Health and Education Sectors. The two projects are of important in that, they use two different approaches of embracing OSS where the Health Sector project uses an approach of getting existing and working open source software framework and customizes it with the help of contributors from Open Source Community, while the Education Sector project developed software from scratch under the auspice of OSS development approach. A comparative analysis of the two projects with the terms of the Open Source Software definition indicates that the two developed software did not take into consideration of all OSS terms. The study concludes that the deviation from the terms of OSS definition reflect incompatibility between free software and open source software philosophies which results into difficulties to comply with one of them. As a result the focus is to achieve the freedom to use the software for any purpose and for any number of computers and the freedom to maintain the software without depending on the author of the software