KMi Seminars
An introduction to open copyright and software licensing
This event took place on Thursday 18 January 2007 at 10:30

 
Richard McCracken Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University, United Kingdom

The presentation will cover copyright's position as one of the intellectual property rights and how it differs from other intellectual property rights. It will give an overview of what copyright protects as well as what may be done with copyright protected works without permission under permitted acts (sometimes or so-called exceptions). It is by manipulating the restricted acts through licensing arrangements that rights owners establish and exploit commercial markets. In contrast to commercial markets, the growth of open source and open content licensing models has challenged established business models. The presentation gives a brief commentary on two of the more prominent open licensing frameworks: the GNU Creative Commons licences.

Richard McCracken is Head of Intellectual Property at The Open University where he is responsible for managing the acquisition and exploitation of copyright and related rights in all media across all platforms: print, online, broadcast and multimedia. He speaks and writes widely on rights management, particularly on the management of rights as part of the production of educational materials.

We apologize that the first few minutes of this presentation are missing due to technical issues.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.