Great topic, Mel. I'm interested to see what folks have to say. My experience is that because copyright applies to a particular work rather than to a particular idea (that's what patents are for), I can publish a paper on a topic at a conference and still use the same concept, algorithm, or teaching strategy in my open source work. Most of my publications have been at Usenix conferences and their copyright policy is a little more liberal, so perhaps that's not true of ACM and IEEE. I'm looking forward to hearing from the rest of the list.
Thanks for bringing this up! Robert M. Marmorstein Assistant Professor of Computer Science Longwood University, Ruffner 329 434.395.2185 marmorstei...@longwood.edu ________________________________________ From: tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org [tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Mel Chua [m...@redhat.com] Sent: Saturday, August 20, 2011 2:12 AM To: 'TOS List' Subject: [TOS] Copyright assignment considered harmful? (The subject line is an allusion to http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html.) As some of you know, I started grad school this week. And... culture shock. Ohhhh boy, culture shock. (Yes, I know every professor who's had me for POSSE is now chortling with we-told-you-so glee.) One incident came today, when at the urging of Karl Fogel, who runs http://questioncopyright.org, I looked into academic copyright -- specifically, what's the deal for the places TOS typically submits to (FIE and SIGCSE)? A few hours and a quietly dawning horror later, I... think I've screwed up. My first couple co-submissions of work on teaching open source are, ironically, *unable* to be open-licensed. I've documented my naive findings here: http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/20/in-which-mel-is-saddened-and-bewildered-by-academic-copyright-assignments/ Please tell me that I'm missing something. How can we get academically-published TOS output released under open licenses? Why do we put up with this? Yes, I understand the publishing industry needs to make money and this "way of doing things" was well-intentioned at the time they were designed, but... but... why? --Mel PS: This isn't the only thing I've written about academic culture shock, btw -- for instance, http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/17/academic-culture-shock-grad-student-ta-training/. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
