The critical importance of managing the IP (intellectual property) aspect of digital learning content

The current copyright arrangements, under which people are permitted to make use of limited sections of copyright works for learning, and the general copyright arrangements for schools/colleges, break down when ICT-enabled learning becomes pervasive.

The two main drivers for this are -

• teachers and students can now easily copy whole works with absolute fidelity, and it is becoming accepted that re-purposing and collaborative sharing of content is desirable in learning,
• the flexibility necessary for learning in today's society means that it is necessary for the school's/college's/university's digital learning content facilities to be accessible online from outside the institution.

These issues demand that educational institutions are fully aware of and manage the IP status and contract terms of the digital content in use by their teachers and students.

This in turn demands that the IP and contract terms of all content, public sector and commercial, becomes explicit and easily visible to all the teachers and students in the institution.

Doing this will raise a number of deep issues, which must be tackled.

Though guidance on IP is being provided by various bodies, the underlying issues are not being addressed well. These include (amongst other issues) -

• how permitting the widespread re-purposing of learning content, that is necessary in the learning process, can become possible alongside commercial approaches to development of learning content.
• how the various different publicly-funded sectors that produce learning content can adopt IP terms that are consistent with public sector approaches, which also enable the content to be used effectively for learning, and which complement and do not conflict with commercial approaches.
• how technical approaches to IP management can be made sufficiently usable so that they complement human approaches and reduce effort by content producers and users.
• how exceptions to world and national copyright rules, which are made to enable learning, research and spread of knowledge, should be adapted for the ICT-rich world we are entering.

The E.E.P. is flagging this as an area where analysis and action is needed. We are interested to hear of people and groups who are tackling these deep issues.

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