The Missing Revolution: K–12 Education should unleash the genius of the web. Why hasn’t it?

About this video

Speaker

James Boyle

Date created

October 23, 2006

Duration

1:06:20

Location

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

File

RealMedia

License

This video copyright ©2006. Terms of use

Related media

• 

Learn more

• Search LEARN NC for copyright, Creative Commons, fair use, Internet, James Boyle, technology, and World Wide Web.

In the classroom

James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University Law School, and founding board member of Creative Commons, spoke at LEARN NC’s Tenth Anniversary Conference in October 2006 on K–12 education, the power of the web, and copyright.

Transcript

Chapter 1. But there will be porn, piracy, and crazy people!

Bobby Hobgood (00:06)

James Boyle is the Williams Reynolds Neil professor of law at Duke University and the co-founder for the Center of the Study of the Public Domain.  He’s the author of several books and articles and writes widely on the issue of intellectual property, internet regulation and legal theory. He’s one of the founding board members of the Creative Commons that you perhaps noticed the icon earlier, Dr. David Walbert showed you here on the site, and is working as a part of that initiative to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and other cultural materials, by developing innovative machine readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. In addition to the Creative Commons, he’s also working with the Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons but in the realm of scientific and technical data. He serves on several advisory boards and in 2003 won the Technology Network Award for law for his work on public domain and the second enclosure movement that threatens it. Professor Boyle writes a regular online column for the Financial Times New Economy Policy Forum, and his most recent book is Bound by Law, a graphic novel, about the effects of intellectual property on documentary film. We are happy to welcome here today for our 10th anniversary conference, James Boyle.

James Boyle (01:38)

Bobby asked me for a bio, and I said I hated long introductions, and I gave him a two-line bio, and said the introduction I wanted was, “Here’s a guy, he’s from Duke,” that would be my bio. As you all obviously know better than I, he takes instruction poorly. So I’m really delighted to be here for lots of reasons. This is a subject very close to my heart. I’m going to talk a little bit about what I think the future might hold for education, and indeed, what things might look like in 2060. It’s actually ironic, because that’s what I wanted to talk about when they contacted me and said would you like to talk? Well this is what I was, wanted to talk about, and I didn’t realize it was going to fit in so beautifully with the theme of the conference. I’m also particularly passionate about education. I’m a teacher, I teach at a law school, I love teaching. And one of the things that I’m most excited about, and the thing that’s going to be the central focus of my talk is to talk about the ways in which technology has changed education and the ways in which it has not changed education in the ways that we might expect that it would have and yet has not. And the goal that I have I think is the same goal that all of you have, which is to make hard-working teachers better to help kids learn and to do so at low or no cost. And that’s I think a central goal that everyone here shares.

(03:07)

So, I want to take us back, just as the introduction did, to the very beginning of this revolution that gave us the world wide web. And I want to give you a little, sort of counter-factual, a little test where you try and imagine how you would have decided something 10 or 15 years ago. The reason I’m going to do this is, if we’re trying to predict the future, if we’re trying to figure out the way things should work, the first thing we’ve got to understand is what kind of mistakes do we habitually make, right? You say this to teachers, oh nod, immediately, I mean, absolutely, most other audiences are like, why would I want to know that? I’m quite serious about this.

(03:56)

There’s a group called behavioral economists who’ve studied human behavior and have told the economists, surprise, surprise, that we don’t behave in a way that economists would predict. So you might say, well, yeah, everybody knew that except economists. But before you start clapping yourself on the back, it’s actually very interesting, they find patterns to the behavior, it’s not that we’re all just so wonderful, you know, and we’re all, we’re all unique and everything, rather it is that we do things, that are from the economic point of view, are irrationally, but they’re irrational in patterns. For example, the behavioral economists tell us that we’re markedly risk averse. We’re frightened of certain kinds of risk. And so, for example, they predict that people will widely over-pay for warranties on their consumer appliances, really dumb. You buy a whole bunch of consumer appliances, some of them are going to break, you’d be much better putting that money in your bank account and not paying for the stupid warranty that the guy from Best Buy makes you do. And all of us think, no, but what if it breaks, I’ll feel so dumb if it breaks when I could’ve bought the warranty, see you buy the warranty, right, it’s like, I do too, right? It’s totally stupid, and we all do it.

(05:01)

There are other kinds of patterns which are kind of interesting. I want to point out one that I think affects us, that is to say, affects people who are trying to create these kinds of wonderful tools. That is to say, a blindness, a tilting of our perception that makes us miss certain kinds of opportunities, makes us less likely to grasp them, makes us less likely to get to the future that we truly want.

(05:23)

So, first of all, I’m going to take you back 15 years instead of 10. So it’s 15 years ago, you’re two or three pounds lighter perhaps, and you’ve been asked in to consult on the invention of a new computer network. They say look, we want this computer network around the world. Now of course, you may not know this, but the internet already exists, it’s used as a flow for email, high-speed transmission of data. But the Worldwide Web that you know so well does not exist, that’s going to actually be generated in the next two or three years. But you’re trying to figure out, well what this worldwide, what would this network, this global network look like?

(06:07)

And so imagine you have two groups of, you know, techies, geeks, which is an honorific, geeks who are telling you, “What kind of system would you like?” One group says, okay, I want something that’s totally open that you can do anything on, it’s just a platform, it’s what’s called a dumb network, the intelligence is at the ends. It will just send your packets along there. It’ll be open and free, anyone can use it, no one will own the protocols by which the stuff travels along there, it’s like you don’t have to pay to get on to it, it’s just, you just have to, as it were, pay for the gas, pay the network cost, but you don’t have to get permission from Microsoft. You can do anything on it, that is to say you can send whatever kinds of packets you want, they could be audio packets, they could be video packets. And anyone could connect to it. Anyone could set up a site. Now try and remember what this would have sounded like in 1991. Anyone could set up a site. Okay. And they could do whatever they wanted on that site, in fact, they could invent whole new technologies that we don’t even understand yet because the network was dumb, it would just pass their packets along like everybody else’s. So that’s one group, right?

(07:12)

The other one gets up and goes, are you insane? What do you think will happen? There’ll be pornography, check, there’ll be viruses, there’ll be spam. Idiots will get up there and, you know, spout all kinds on nonsense, I mean, you know, there’ll be this person going on about what’s going on in Iraq and it’s not even the New York Times and how will you know to trust it, and it’ll be a disaster. No, no, no, what you need is a terminal, where you could do like three things, you know, print, maybe scroll down, you know, and you need permission from, I don’t know, like the government or Microsoft or something to get on the network because otherwise anyone could put anything up! You know, anyone, am I getting through to you with this anyone idea? This is so bizarre.

(07:59)

Admit it, most of us would lean towards the second option, because there’d be porn! Check. There’d be piracy! Check. Right? There’ll be crazy people, check, check, check, check, right? And the idea that by leaving this system open allowing porn and piracy but also innovation and free speech and criticism and blogging and a bunch of things that we hadn’t even figured out yet. We would have this explosion which, in some sense, brings us all here today. I think that most of us would have turned away from that open option and embraced the dumb terminal with both arms. That’s scary, because we would have been wrong, at least in my view.

Chapter 2. Do giraffes really have the same number of vertebrae as we do?

(00:02)

Okay, so second one, now it’s only ten years ago. And I come to you and I say, look, I want to enlist you in something, you’re educators. I’d like you to create the greatest reference work, factual reference work that the world has ever seen. I want this to be like the Encyclopedia Britannica on steroids. So I don’t just want to know, you know, the population of Thailand and Thailand’s main experts, I want to know the best Thai food in Chapel Hill. And I want to know about what it’s like to be a gay person in Thailand, and I want to know what the best beaches are in Thailand, and on every issue from quilting to the raising of bizarre brands — types of dog, I want someone out there who would give me all of this, and I want it instantaneously, and free, at the cost of connecting to a network, so that wherever I am, I can just think, “Who played so-and-so in that movie?” Or, “What was that theory that they had about economics in the 16th century that said we’d be better off if we kept all the money in the country?” Or, “Do giraffes really have the same number of vertebrae as we do?” And you have to build it. That’s your job. I’ll give you five years. So what would you think you would need to build this? I think you would say, we need an enormous amount of money, for a start, we need to assemble the best experts the world has ever seen, we have to tell them, okay, you write about giraffes, right, you’re going to write about Thailand, you know. We have to vet them, we have to have layers upon layers of editors. We need strong control, both copyright and trademark, we’ll call it the Encyclopedia Boyliana, and that trademark is going to be the mark for proper knowledge, that if it says Boyliana on it, then you know that it’s the real stuff.

(02:01)

I should note, by the way, that the Encyclopedia Britannica as you probably know was originally written by Scots, and — it’s true, there are a number of great things about it. The first thing is it comes in three volumes, the first edition was in three volumes. The first one was A to B, three volumes, the second one was B to D, and the last one was D to Z, right. So that I find amusing, we all kind of, well let’s rush through this, it’s going to take too long. The other thing I love about it is that the combined entries in A to B had a hundred pages, no excuse me, had 70 pages devoted to accounting, and 110 devoted to brewing. My country ’tis of thee.

(02:50)

So the Encyclopedia Boyliana, this 21st-century equivalent, is obviously going to need this enormous infrastructure, basically a highly centralized corporation, strong control from the top, strong property rights, massive layers of editorial control, forbidding people to copy them. The whole idea of offering it free, that’s right out the window. I mean the costs here will be enormous and they’ll obviously going to have to be recouped, you’re going to have to make people pay for access, you let them see a little bit, et cetera, et cetera.

(03:17)

So, the question is, when’s the last time that you looked at an encyclopedia? Where do you find out that mercantilist theory of economics or how many vertebrae the giraffe has, or who played so-and-so, Dr. Kildaire in that old TV show? Google, right? Now, let me not romanticize Google. You’re absolutely right that it’s probably the single biggest thing you could do as educators, is to give your students the cultural tools which we all apply when we look at a page of search results to go, nonsense, nonsense, ooh, interesting, right? So let me not romanticize, but on the other hand, let us not minimize either. This is bizarre that we created this body of material. The world’s knowledge in an incredibly tiny period of time, and put it up there. And it’s useful. We use it all the time. In fact, there’s actually a term. The right-click generation, for people who look at like a monument or a building and want to say, like, what is that, I want to right click, let me mouse over, you know. The world doesn’t have that. Why not? It will, no, really, it will, I’ll give you a little prediction there, we’ll have glasses, you’ll just go like that. I’m completely serious about this, and sooner than you think.

(04:48)

But that has become so woven in the fabric of our lives that the old idea of not knowing something, right, some piece of factual information has simply disappeared from those who have access, and as I said, very important, the cultural tools to understand what’s going on.

(05:04)

Now, if I had told you this in 1996 — if I had said, no, what’ll happen is a whole bunch of people will just put all this stuff up on the internet, some of it will be completely insane, some of it will be factually wrong, anyone can write about what they want, and it’ll kind of organize itself somehow into the greatest reference work that the work that the world has ever seen. I’m not just talking about just Wikipedia here, I’m talking about the whole web. You would have said, take him away, there’s a really nice soft-padded room waiting for you. Wouldn’t you? I mean, I would have. Again, we would have been wrong. How does it happen. What happens because people have enthusiasms, because they love to share knowledge and information, so they put stuff up. It happens because other people around them know, roughly speaking, which ones are actually making sense, and link to them disproportionately when they are making sense.

(06:00)

Google’s search engine, the reason Google is the total — dominates the market, is when everybody else was going out, this is a third example, everyone else is going out, the way to organize the web is to have a bunch of experts. What are the best sites on geology, what are the, right, that vision, like we’re cataloging it, like the French encyclopedists. What did Google do? Google said, how do you find water? How do you find water? You watch where the other animals are going. Follow their tracks. It’s called a water-hole search algorithm. Because they’re strongly motivated to find the best things, the best ways to get there.

(06:40)

So, third example then, that this mass of stuff, huge, huge quantities of which is completely wrong would nevertheless be organized into a usable resource that all of us would benefit from. Sometimes our students benefit from it just a little to much, willing to acknowledge that, but nevertheless, what a transformation. The point is we would have been wrong, wrong, wrong about each of these developments. Why? Same mistake each time.

(07:08)

Our understanding of property is built around stuff like this. If I’ve got it, you can’t have it. If I’m going to drink it, you can’t drink it too, unless I know you very, very well, okay, and even then, perhaps not. If I have a field, and the field could be developed, or harvested, or have animals grazing on it by a thousand people, the economists even have a term for it, they say it’s the tragedy of the commons, right? No one’s ever going to invest in it because you could be the one who harvests it. You have the incentive to overgraze, because, hey, you know, you’ve got no way of stopping it. So have your horses and or your cows get on there and graze as fast as you can because it’ll be gone soon. That’s what we think about tangible property, right. And so what do we say, we have to have single ownership, control, right? You have to put a fence around it and say, okay, you get to own it, and you get to control it, which will give you the incentive to invest in it, which will give you the ability to control it, you can keep out trespassers, you can make your workers work hard. That’s coded deep into our assumptions about society and how things work. And that’s how you did every single time when I asked you to design a network. It needs to be controlled, you said. When I asked you to say how to develop an encyclopedia, I need to be the boss, or someone else needs to be the boss, but there needs to be a boss and it needs to be controlled. And when you thought about how to design a search engine, well, you can’t just let anyone say what’s a good site. We need an expert. There needs to be control.

(08:46)

Let me stress something here. It’s not that control is always wrong. That would be crazy. Control is often necessary, particularly in the classroom. The point is that we get innovation out of a balance between openness and control, between freedom and property. And we are likely to get the balance wrong, every time, we’re likely to tilt in the wrong direction. That’s my hypothesis. I think it’s a pretty good one. I mean I actually think you if you did that little back 15 years, back ten years thing, you’re kind of surprised at how much you would have missed what actually happened. And can you say that when the next opportunity, the next Worldwide Web, the next equivalent of Wikipedia, or Google comes to you, that you wouldn’t automatically shy away?

(09:37)

So, first thing, first take away, I guess, from the talk, is I would propose that you add in, rather like a pilot who checks her sense of whether the plan is upright or maybe flying upside-down by looking at the little, you know, instrument in front of her. I would suggest that you check your intuition. When you say, well we couldn’t do it that way, but you say, or could we? Could we open that up, could we do this collaboratively? What implication does this have for education online? Okay, let me go back. So again, let’s go back to 1991 again.

Chapter 3. With enough eyeballs all problems are shallow

James Boyle (00:02)

If you were thinking about how to put together software, you probably would have done much the same thing as I described when you were trying to design a network or design an encyclopedia. Namely you’d say, well look, this software’s a machine, it has to work. Imagine having a machine where everyone gets to go off and design their own bits of it without regard to whether or not their bit will work very well with the other bits. Where there’s no boss, where you might want a four-wheel drive and I might want a rear-wheel drive, and the other person might want a hovercraft, and they all just get to put it all together. That wouldn’t work, right? That clearly doesn’t work. Obviously what we need is centralized control, proprietary control, strong central direction. Microsoft.

(00:52)

Except, as you probably know, most of the web runs on open-sourced software, software that’s developed exactly in the way that I just described, mainly by large numbers of individuals, some of whom are working for pay, some of whom are doing it out of love or volunteerism or in order to impress other people with their credentials. Putting it together is this amazing, kind of, really hard to model or pattern, social organization where basically peer review happens, you know, you’re code’s rubbish, I’m not going to listen to you, but your last piece of code was good, so when you offer another piece of code, I’m going to say, okay, that gets pushed up the chain and gets assembled in this totally bizarre way. It looks like kind of a mixture between a food fight and a parliamentary session all conducted by geeks with not very good social skills over email. And it works! It works. It’s astounding how well it works. I mean it works so that the NSA has actually said that they wanted to use open-sourced software rather than proprietary software to preserve security. Why? Because anyone can come up with an encryption scheme, a scheme for coding things that he isn’t smart enough to break. Think about that for a moment.

(02:06)

Right, you want to code your data, it’s like, no one can break this! What’s the best way to have truly unbreakable codes, make them completely open to the world, right? Completely counter-intuitive, right? Make them open and have million people try to break it. And if they can’t break it, then you’ve got something.

(02:25)

Is this such an unfamiliar idea? No, it’s the idea behind democracy, right? It’s the idea that yes, there are individually very impressive people, but the collective intelligence brought when applied to something is actually, in the long run, better. Karl Popper, the Open Society. The software geeks have a different term for it, they say with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, are problems are capable of solution.

(02:55)

One final counter-factual, taking you back in time. Supposing I give you all these other pieces of information, I say look, there’s going to be this web, it’s going to develop like this, people are going to do all kinds of decentralized creativity on it. It’s going to be really interesting, there’s going to be you know, people developing software, and I would tell you all about this and you would get very excited, and I say, what will it do to education? Once I told you these other things, I think, and convinced you, which would have been hard, but let’s say I’ve managed to convince you somehow. I have, you know, the little watch and I hold it in front of you and you go, wow! You drink the Kool-Aid. You get excited. You go, this is amazing!

(03:30)

And then I said, okay, what cultural, scientific, whatever, forms — what types of creativity are going to be most impacted by this? What’s the area where we’re going to see this kind of distributed creativity, where hundreds of thousands or millions of people come together to create things? Think Wikipedia. Where’s the place where it’s obviously going to succeed? You would have said K-12 education. Absolutely. There’s just no doubt about it, right? Why? Have you ever met a teacher who could resist telling you about the clever lesson plan that she just came up with? I can’t. It’s like, I like, no, I did this great thing in class, my kids are like, thanks Dad, I bet it was really fun.

(04:15)

We want to, we can’t stop ourselves from sharing that great little trick that we use in classroom, right? That’s one of the reasons, and it’s exciting, it’s exciting to hear somebody else say, oh, I could use that, right? One of my kid’s science teachers was trying to teach them the scientific method, she was very worried that people lose sight of what the scientific method is. She got a short story, laminated all of its pages, and then cut them up so that they were just like one or two lines. Distributes it to the whole class. And then she gets together, okay, each of you has to guess what the story’s about. So, you know, you’ve got some random line and you guess. Okay, now you get together and in a group of five, and guess what the story’s about. And now in a group of ten, and now in a group of twenty, and look what happens!

(05:03)

Many eyeballs come together, each with its own little piece of information being forced to state hypotheses and test them against the other evidence, isn’t it great? I jut love this idea, I got all excited about it, I thought, how could I do it in a law classroom? That’s what we do all the time, share stuff like that.

(05:21)

So, LEARN NC is a national leader in this. But I have to say, and the stuff I saw today is just amazing, I have to say that if the truly remarkable thing about the internet is that it enabled all kinds of collaborative development, where there’s massively distributed creativity, and hundreds of thousands of millions of people come together in order to create something. And you said, okay, list the things that are likely to be developed this way, in order. An encyclopedia, an operating system, a software operating system or every lesson plan in K through 12? I would have picked every lesson plan in K through 12 as number one, and I would have been completely wrong.

(06:00)

So why? I mean, of course, there are resources, and you’ve just seen them, and they’re fabulous. But what we don’t have is a situation where every time every teacher, or most teachers, the vast majority of teachers develops a lesson plan, they’re automatically putting it on something saying, okay, I need to teach about the War of 1812, where is it, how do I get it? Okay, there’s there, I didn’t like this, I’m going to tweak it, I’m going to modify it, here I marked my modification, the modification is down there. Where there’s hundreds, thousands of other people going, you know, Deborah Smith’s modification is really good, but you know what? John Jones’s little intro to the origins of the War of 1812 is fabulous, that’s the way to string them together. You would have little road maps through those modules, those chunks saying, where did most people go? How many people went through here? When they went through here, how did they put these things together? When this person who’s teaching African American history unti1 1950 was doing it, can they use this stuff about the Scottsboro boys which is actually taken from a completely different class. Easily, just pick it up and drop it, and if that takes off, if people like it, can that be developed?

(07:15)

And then, when all of that has happened, can it generate, [snap] like that, within a week? High-quality printed materials that you could distribute in the class.

(07:27)

For years I’ve been working on a novel, finished it ten days ago, here it is. I finished it ten days ago. I went to, actually, it’s a North Carolina company, called Lulu, I uploaded it, they printed it. One copy. They printed one copy and sent it to me. I’m hoping, you know, there might one day be another copy. But that’s not the point, the point is, there it is! It’s printed and everything. This one costs about 8 dollars if you were buying in bulk, to print. The raw cost. If you’re buying in bulk the cost would go down.

(08:07)

Imagine a system where you had modules of content, organized as I’ve described, rated, navigated, and then other people, let’s say, and putting filters on them, okay, let’s say if you want to comply with the North Carolina rules, or, what we have to teach to here, here’s a track, any of these within this one, right? Easy to mark, right, easy to tag. These are all okay. And imagine that as something that not just the techies did, but everyone who uses Google, right? Everyone, anywhere, who is a teacher, not just in the United States, maybe. Calculus, not that different, in Britain. The accent is slightly different, but the curves are the same, right? There are great teachers all over the world, and we can learn from all of them.

(08:58)

So why don’t we have that? That’s my question. Don’t get me wrong. LEARN NC is fabulous. But the point is this is a little beacon of light in what is an amazingly dark space when we think about what the potential could have been.

(09:17)

My vision for 2016 is the one I’ve just described for you. It’s not that I want to put McGraw-Hill out of business, but what I do want to do is make them compete really hard with user-generated content with teachers who are passionate. Because, after all, how did you learn to teach? Okay, there were classes and whatever, but basically you found someone who was really good and you copied everything you could, right? And then you added your own little twists, right?

(09:44)

So let me see if I can, what do I press to start this up again? Power button? Why don’t you, yeah, why don’t you do it? Thanks. So, why don’t we have it, is my question. It just hibernated, so I think you’ll probably have to restart. Why don’t we have this system that I have described?

Chapter 4. Everyone’s sock drawer is on the world wide web

(00:02)

I think there’s a bunch of reasons. One reason is that when you are generating material like this, you have to have, it doesn’t matter, it’s fine, you have to have a set of systems that make it completely easy for you to do this. If it’s something that you have to learn, forget it. Teachers already have far too much in their lives, right? This has to be as easy as writing the Microsoft Word document in which they write their lesson plan anyway. It has to be available on the open web. This is big arrow number one.

(00:37)

There are great things out there in terms of teaching resources, but many of them are not available on the open web. Many of them you have to log into some system, you get in here, there’s this little ghetto of protected content that you somehow get access to, and there’s another great little one over here, and another great little one over here. And first of all, the first big problem is how do people find things? Well they find it with Google, right? So if it’s not on the open web, they don’t find it. You have to spend hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars teaching the people who are supposed to be using your stuff that the stuff is there.

(01:12)

When if it was just there, they’d probably find it themselves. I bet you that there are lots of people who have closed-system educational web devices who, where their county, their city, their whatever it has has paid huge amounts of money to generate it, and they end up going off and just using Google and finding some completely worthless or not as good alternative.

(01:40)

So, what’s the second reason? The first thing is it has to be out there, it has to be available on the open web. This is actually, I am going to make a pitch for open-sourced software, but I didn’t mean to make it this overtly. I was actually at a conference where Bill Gates once presented, and he had an extremely — it was at the very birth of the net, he had a very fancy presentation, and of course, it totally failed to come up, so he stands there, and you can see, like, his tech guy literally thinking, “I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.” And right at the very moment where the tension reaches its height, someone yells out, “Buy a Mac!” At that point it was quite clear that the guy’s, change your battery, shift-outlet-power, oh this is just a lot of fun. Okay, maybe you can figure this out.

(02:39)

So, second problem is specifically a legal problem. Copyright is actually not supposed to not be a pain. No, really! No, I mean, it’s true, we lawyers do actually sit around sometimes and say, “How can we really mess everyone up?” But copyright was actually not supposed to be one of those, right? It was supposed to be a well-functioning system that just provided you with the stuff that you needed. It was supposed to give incentives to producers to produce, and to distributors to distribute. And then it was supposed to give users the rights they needed. That’s, it was a machine that was supposed to do something.

(03:27)

So right at the moment when we were going to move towards digital distribution, it’s actually ‘86, so preceding my date by a few years, we changed the copyright law, we changed it in the following important way: It used to be that in order to get a copyright, you had to put a little C, you know, James Boyle C, James Boyle copyright, James Boyle copyright 2006, right, you had to do that. If you didn’t, the stuff went into the public domain, immediately. You published it, it went into to the public domain.

(03:56)

So 99 percent — 99.9 percent of all the material ever produced by ordinary people, right, was immediately in the public domain. You know, when you wrote your diary, unless you were, a little strange, you didn’t write copyright on it, well maybe when you’re kids, maybe you write copyright all over it, but I mean most, if you wrote a poem, you didn’t write copyright at the top, it went into the public domain.

(04:19)

But it didn’t matter. Because the point was, you had this stuff, it was going into the public domain, but so what, no one could get it, it was sitting there in your sock drawer, right? There’s your journal, there’s your poem, there’s your whatever it is, just sitting there nicely, and maybe you pull it out and go, oh what a great poem it was, but nobody else can see it.

(04:38)

Fast forward to today. Everyone’s sock drawer is on the Worldwide Web, right? Blogs, photographs, people share things, as you know, that you’re very surprised that they shared. Thank you for not sharing that with me, we want to say. And suddenly all this material is up there, but we had changed the law, and the law now said that as soon as you fixed it into material form, you press save on your computer, you pressed print, the photograph went click, you went record on the recording button. As soon as you did that, it was copyrighted for your entire lifetime plus 70 years. And it’s a strict liability system, which means good intentions in using it are no excuse.

(05:27)

So suddenly, this 99.9 percent of stuff, which had been free, was protected right at the moment when it was suddenly possible for individuals to be publishers. So what does that mean? That means vast masses of stuff on the web, and in most cases it’s completely unclear whether or how you can use it. Now of course you say, well, it’s up there, I can at least look at it, right? True, although in some cases there have been suits for people from just linking to sites, deep linking, like linking on the first page. That’s not illegal, don’t let anyone tell you it is. And you figure out I can probably print it, but can you make 50 copies, can you take the calculus lesson and incorporate it into yours, can you use that picture in your own presentation? You have no idea. You have no idea because I have very little idea, and I’m an intellectual property professor.

(06:15)

So Larry Lessig and a group of others founded an organization called Creative Commons to solve this problem. Creative Commons allows people to publish their material, notice, their material, not other people’s material. This is like, this is great, I’ll put it under Creative Commons license, I’ll put Madonna under a Creative Commons license. No no no, your material. And specify, in very simple ways, a few things about it. So, let’s do this lighting thing. Allow commercial uses of your work, yes, no. Allow modifications of your work. Yes is so others share alike, that means “yeah you can take my work and excerpt it, but if you do, you’ve got to put it under a license as generous as this one, so that everybody’s going to have the freedom I gave you.”

(07:08)

You could pick that, you could just pick no, maybe you want the whole thing kept there. What, where are you, here are all the different countries that this applies to. Tell us the format of your work, audio, video, and so you select your license. So I’ve done that and I get this. This — don’t worry it’s going to be a lot easier than this, this is a bunch of geek code here, which is meant to talk to machines, not to you, but to machines. It’s meant to tell search engines, “This is a thing, a movie, a song, a text, which is available for noncommercial use with attribution.” Or which could even be used for commercial use, and could even, derivative works could made of, you could chop it up.

(07:52)

And so, this is, that was machine readable, this is human readable, as opposed to lawyer readable. This is, notice that, see, you can understand it. This was really hard. No, you’ve no idea, there’s actually a legal, you really have no idea, this is the legal code, this is what actually gets you there, you don’t ever need to look at this. This is the full thing right? This costs millions of dollars in pro bono legal fees to develop, but this is what you need to know about, right.

(08:34)

And you put this on your work, and what does that do? What it does is it creates a commons of material out there where you never need to ask for permission. Permission has already been granted and the terms of the permission have been granted, so let’s say you wanted to do your multimedia resources center as in here. One way to do it would be to have a single person, who’s a great photographer, give you a bunch of slides. That would be fabulous. But how about having every photographer in the world taking pictures and tagging them and saying, “here they are.” Flickr, for example, they’re tagged with Creative Commons licenses.

(09:11)

There are now 160 million digital objects tagged with Creative Commons licenses, we launched, I guess, three and a half years ago. The first year we hoped to get a hundred thousand, we got a million, and the growth rate has been like this [motions exponentially]. How come the only things I work to help create that have growth rates like that are non-profits? It’s like, you know, what was I thinking? I could have videos of exploding Mentos and get one point 6 billion dollars and instead I choose to open up the culture of the world and do it for free. It’s always been a problem.

(09:52)

So Creative Commons license are something you need to do. I would suggest that whatever you do, however you work with this thing, think about the license. Why? Because you’re not thinking about how you’re going to use it, you want to be thinking about how everybody else can use it. Why? Because you want to be able to use all their stuff, right? And just put it together, you want it to be simple, you never ever ever, after today, want to hear a lawyer ever again. This is, the goal here is the abolition of lawyers. Well, you know, you’ll keep a few around for display purposes.

Chapter 5. I can do whatever I want but it’s all illegal

James Boyle (00:00)

Okay, so this is a second thing I just thought I’d show you. One of the things that I’ve found is that people are completely clueless about copyright and in particular about fair use, and it’s something that educators really need to understand. For some reason all of you don’t like reading the law review articles we write, so I don’t know, they have so many footnotes, how could you not like them? So we decided to produce a comic book which is available under Creative Commons license on the web for free, and also you can buy like bulk units, which actually goes through and explains fair use, copyright, the whole thing.

(00:42)

It’s actually, it’s interesting, we developed it for film students. Our single biggest order so far have been from K-12 education. They’re ordering 50 and a hundred at a time. We have a special, we got subsidies, so we that can produce low cost hard copies for educational users. All these K-12, I think they’re teaching social studies classes in it, because the kids have this attitude of both everything is forbidden and everything is permitted, right. It’s kind of like, “I can do whatever I want but it’s all illegal.” One of my — I was writing an article about the history of intellectual property, and I quoted from a poem, which comes, probably, from the end of the 18th century about the enclosure movement. The enclosure movement is where they take the common land in England and other places in the world, and they say, “This is being used inefficiently, we’re going to fence it off and hand it over to the local land owner,” generally, “and that’s going to be his, and he’s going to be able to run it, and we’re going to get all kinds of social and economic benefits.”

(01:41)

And of course there were enormous protests at the time because all the villagers had been grazing their sheep on the commons and hunting on the commons and they’re very upset about this. And they lose. And at the time someone wrote this poem. “The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common but let’s the greater villain loose who steals the common from under the goose.” Nice, they could rhyme in politics in those days.

(02:11)

So this is a great little story, and I was talking about, is there a comparison between what we’re doing now, where we’re increasingly putting intellectual copyrights all over everything, to this older enclosure. But in the course of doing that, as a good little scholar, I had to track down where this poem came from and I found 50 different attributions and my poor long-suffering research assistant is set to write emails to all the people who have this poem up on their page, saying, “Hey you said this is from 1800, why did you say that, what was your basis?” He sends out 25 letters, he gets back 17 replies back that say, “We will take it down immediately, please do not sue us!”

(02:47)

Now, we cover many things with copyright, but even in the United States today, we do not cover 18th-century anonymous poems by copyright, okay, that’s in the public domain. I’m just going to go out on a limb and tell you that, okay? You can take that one to the bank. So my research assistant writes back, “No, look, I was asking for provenance, you know, where it came from, what’s your source?” Five letters come back, one of them, “The journalist responsible has been disciplined.” This is the bipolar intellectual property culture we live in, right? Everything is forbidden, everything is permitted, I can do whatever I want, but it’s all illegal! And if every I get a letter that says “law” on it, like Duke Law School, “Oh my god, they’re going to sue me, the IRA is coming after me.” I don’t know if the IRA handles three-hundred-year-old poems, but I’m sure there’s a trade group that does.

(03:38)

So we wrote this comic to give people actually balanced information about what copyright does, and what it does not do, and what you’re allowed to do under fair use. As I said, we wrote it for documentary film students, but it’s increasingly being used more widely.

(03:54)

So, second reason is not just that we haven’t got what I was describing, it’s not just that the material’s not available on the open web, it’s that even when it is available on the open web, it’s not clear how you can use it and how you can put it together. So one person might say, “You can use this for educational use.” Okay, well does that mean you can use it for for-profit educational use? Does that mean…? The other person says, “Non-profit.” Somebody else says, “personal.” Does that mean personal as a teacher?

(04:25)

You need standard terms that let you know what’s in the commons and what isn’t. That’s the Creative Commons part. You need greater education among educators and students about what they can do under the existing limitations in fair use. That’s the education part. So you need openness, not just in architecture — you don’t need a password to get into the site — but openness in the sense of transparency about legal availability. Because imagine a system where you want to put together the multimedia presentation, you want to get your kids excited by this. And you have not just the great resources that are currently in the LEARN NC multimedia site, but potentially a hundred million others. Well you might say, a hundred million’s too many. How about a hundred million others that have been rated by teachers that say, “These are the best ones.” That’s what I’d like to see in 2016.

(05:19)

So there’s some examples of this, this is, I think, an interesting model. It’s largely in the university level, Connections, so I’m also affiliated with them, a group at Rice. What they have that I think is very interesting — and this is where I think the future is, maybe not their iteration of it, but it’s cnx.org — is they have understood that the teaching needs to be modular, number one. So there are these very small units of content, and this, I think, is in common with LEARN NC. Very small units of content, which you can put together as you wish. So that you’re, let’s say you’re teaching the music theory class. Okay, so you have the basic introduction to musical notation. Somebody else is teaching guitar, they want the musical notation, the next module’s going to be totally different.

(06:11)

And as people go through it, they leave a trail behind them of the things they have strung together, and you can start to follow the trails, remember Google and the water holes? Huh. Most North Carolina teachers teaching the civil rights movement picked these 18 modules, and did them in this way. Now maybe I want to switch module five and seven, great then that’s more data, and that flows back into the system, it’s the beneficial cycle. We start to capture all of that implicit, tacit knowledge in the minds of great teachers everywhere, and link it to the power of collective intelligence, which is our ability to understand this. That’s what we’re only halfway to right now. And imagine how cool that would be.

(06:57)

So, final example, Connections, by the way, is under the Creative Commons license, this is MIT’s open courseware at the university level. MIT decided to put up all the teaching materials for every class they teach on the open web, for free. And in many cases, videos of the professors actually teaching it. Plus they’re developing a tool now, this is going to be really cool, which will automatically provide a transcript of video that runs beside the video. Speech recognition software. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough, because you know, one of the biggest things is, who’s going to watch an hour video to find out if it’s useful enough? Why do you look at text? Because you can search quickly in them, right?

(07:39)

Imagine being able to do that a video, “Oh, he does discuss the War of 1812. I will use it,” right? So the thing about this is, this is all up under Creative Commons licenses. What that means is when the group in China, the PRC, wanted to translate all of it, all of it into Mandarin, they could without asking permission. Only to find that the group from Taiwan was also doing that, and amazingly enough, the two groups collaborated in order to produce the translation.

(08:10)

So that’s the next level. It’s not just within the United States, it’s not just within North Carolina, it’s all over the world. I imagine a world in which the idea that you would have to pay for high quality educational materials was as bizarre as the idea that you would have to buy an encyclopedia. I mean, I still have encyclopedias because I love physical objects. But let’s face it. The way in which we get our information has changed, and the assumption is, it’s free once you’ve paid the bandwidth cost. Why should this not be the case for educational resources? Particularly since teachers love to share.

Chapter 6. How can we screw all of this up?

James Boyle (00:01)

Okay, how can we screw all this up? It’s always, I’m a Scot, so it’s always, you know, this is the happy picture but now I’m required by my nationality to turn and sin*, and *turn* will lead you away from the lairs of righteousness. So the first way in which we can screw this up is the educational publishers who are not stupid have already figured out that they can do this, and they will want to do it, but of course they’ll want to do it only with their content. So you’ll get the extremely expensive, extremely expensive workbook with all of its annoyingly and badly written questions. Is there something about people who produce workbooks? I mean, my kids come to me and ask me, and I sit there and go, “That is a dreadfully constructed sentence.” Okay, momentary anecdote, my favorite one was one in Washington, D.C., where they were testing them, they were giving them the pretest that like helped them along, I don’t know, the whatever was the little aptitude test they were going to do, and they wanted to help them out, so the D.C. public school system put its whole might behind it and produced the following wonderful set of examples: Number one: “The first manned mission to Mars was in: 1967, 1969, 1971, or 1972?” Mars, yes, you’ve got it. I also liked the synonyms section, “bed is a synonym for a: sleep, b: eat, c: rest, d: lie.” You’re not doing very well on these, I mean, you’re teachers, you ought to be, frankly, a little disappointed.

(01:44)

So, there’s a lot of really, in my view, mixed quality educational — proprietary commercial educational material. And the point is, all of us are smarter than just one of us and they understand, the ones that aren’t dumb, that this could really threaten their business model, because they can charge extremely high prices, very very very high prices, they do it by selling on a school-wide basis. They do it by negotiating the regulatory barriers, which have been set up so that you have to conform to whatever the local jurisdiction’s teaching requirements are. And that’s a valuable service.

(02:21)

But imagine someone who set up, even a for-profit business who said, “I will guarantee you that these modules taken from LEARN NC’s repository satisfy the California standards,” let’s say. You could imagine that happening. So what do they want to do? What they want to do is to lock you into closed architectures. What do I mean by that? First of all, not just software you have to pay for. It’s software where the content of the software is proprietary. You can’t tinker with it, you can’t change it without permission. You can’t modify it.

(02:51)

And their content, they’ve got all this content sitting there, they want you to only use that. You can do stuff on American Indians, but only their stuff about American Indians. And they’ll let you put in your content so long as they get to keep it. And they’ll link it to a really cool site like Blackboard, say, and, you know, Blackboard, it appears to be to my colleagues rather like crack cocaine, they try it and it’s just impossible to get them off it.

(03:17)

And suddenly you’ll have all these closed libraries of material and you’ll have all this stuff that you’ve invested all this time in and it’ll be behind a firewall. Google won’t be able to find it, you won’t be able to use it in the future, I won’t be able to adapt it, and they’ll say, “Isn’t it fun, we’re sharing.” This is the wrong road, okay? This is running back to the closed system, to the terminal, and to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

(03:45)

So, my message is, if there was a single cultural enterprise that could benefit most from the technology of the web, it is K through 12 education. And it is up to us to make sure that we actually live up to that potential. Thank you very much. [applause]

(04:16)

Questions. Sir?

Audience member (04:19)

[Off-mic question]

James Boyle (04:24)

Yes. Sure. So net neutrality — for those who don’t know the jargon — net neutrality is the idea that if you’ve paid for a certain level of service, let’s say you’ve got the, you know, 1.5 megabyte download, 350-kilobyte upload as Time Warner Cable provides you with, that Time Warner Cable ought not to be able to discriminate among providers of content in speeds. So that, for example, you would get Time Warner cartoons at, you know, 1.5, but if it came from Disney, then you’d only get it at .2, for example. That Google would come up really really slowly, but Yahoo would come up really really fast. That the net should be neutral to the content that passes over it up to whatever level of service you provided, now this is a very important limitation, right? Doesn’t mean that I’m guaranteed the same speed as you get off one of the internet 2 things where you can get full motion video, you know, telly operation, whatever. It just means whatever level I paid for, I get it with everyone. You don’t discriminate.

(05:28)

The cable companies say, and the internet people who want to build the new network, say, “We want to build new networks giving you new possibilities, new things, but we have to be able to discriminate because that’s how we’ll make money. So we’ll make deals.” I think it’s a disaster if they are out to do this. First of all that allows them to pick the winners. Back to my first point. Guess which winners they’ll pick? Right? Right, and their own ones, and then they’ll have really bad ideas about other ones, right?

(05:58)

So imagine an AOL-Time-Warner-, you know, designed web, okay, those were some good shudders, that was excellent. I can talk about spiders later and see if people [shudders]. So I think it’s a really bad idea. I think it’s going to be particularly important to the extent that K-12 education involves high quality, interactive video. I don’t think it’s an issue for simple text, simple photographs, even just plain audio. Because whatever level they provide, that stuff’s going to work well enough. I have to say I have my doubts about high-quality interactive video as actually being the way of the future in education. Sure, seeing a video clip here and there, but my sense is, we’d been saying since the 1950s when everyone said television was going to revolutionize education. We’d been saying that this video thing was going to revolutionize education, and you know what, it hasn’t. In little tiny little nuggets here and there where it can be truly useful.

(07:03)

So, I have my doubts, whether that’s going to be there. So it may be, this is the optimistic mode, that even if the battle for net neutrality is lost, that nevertheless that doesn’t impact K-12 education. However, having a system where you’re basically dependent on the goodwill of the network for your content reaching your intended audience is a disaster, and, I mean, it’s the entire net considered as the New Jersey Turnpike run by AOL, so no, I’m not particularly keen on the idea, I’m very keen on the neutrality. Other comments, questions?

Chapter 7. Questions

Audience member (00:02)

[Off-mic question]

James Boyle (00:10)

Right, so the difficulty again here was copyright used to be this thing which was designed to be a landmine that only, you know, trucks could set off, tanks, in other words, competing industrial providers, because as of 1950 those were the only people who could violate copyright. I give you a book from 1950 and say “Violate copyright,” you can’t do it, right, it’s just impossible. Now we all can violate copyright every second of every day, and podcasting is just one of the types of creative expression that falls into that. The key thing with podcasting is that people obviously want to incorporate chunks of other people’s stuff in their podcast; music, so forth. And the answer to that I think is a mixture of Creative Commons or other licenses that allow you to do it, so you know this music is pre-approved for me to use here. Plus a good understanding of fair use because if you want to comment on a portion of a speech by a government official, you know, so long Jon Stewart, you can take that little nugget and pop it in your podcast, and that’s perfectly okay, that’s a fair use, and you have to understand what that is.

(01:12)

But the difficulty of course, which is the difficulty everywhere, is we designed this system to be navigated by large corporations with printing presses and many lawyers. Right? That’s what the system’s designed to be. Fixing the system so it works for people is extremely hard. The Creative Commons system is a hack. It’s an attempt to hack the system to make it work for people, it’s a second best solution. The first best solution would be to fix the law so that it applied in more rational ways to individuals. That’s too expensive at the going rate of congress. So as a result, I think we need hacks like that.

(01:51)

There are sites, as you probably know, that do pod-safe content, so that you can know you can draw from it. And that’s I think we will increasingly have to do. One thing I should have mentioned and did not, if you’re interested in this Creative Commons stuff, you can actually go to any, well certainly, to Google or to Yahoo. And in Google you go to advanced search, and Yahoo I think it’s right there in the page, and you can search by license, so you can actually filter it. So if you go to Google advanced search, search by license, it doesn’t say Creative Commons because Google doesn’t like anybody else’s trademark on their page, but it is Creative Common’s licenses. It searching, let’s say you search for physics textbook under non-commercial license. Pop, there’s a physics textbook. Let’s say you say classical music, I want, you know, “Nearer My God to Thee” because I want to put it in my podcast, there it is. There’s, as always, vast amounts of junk as well, but that’s the method.

Audience member (02:46)

[Off-mic question]

James Boyle (02:57)

Yeah, that’s a very good question. So, his question, people that didn’t hear, are the cases where people have been sued, how seriously do they have to take it? I separate the two. Most publishers and content providers are smart enough not to sue teachers. Because teachers are very sympathetic defendants, right? No, you are, really, really, you do yourself discredit if you think otherwise.

(03:23)

So, there are almost no suits where that has happened or that has happened is where you’re suing, let’s say Columbia University for allowing people to create course packs, you know, where it’s an institution-wide policy. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that it probably won’t be a suit that’ll get you, it will probably be a complaint to your principal, or to the head of the whomever who will then come and say, “How come I had to deal with this letter, I’m annoyed at you,” you know, and perhaps something worse. So it’s internal policies. And that leads to a very important point.

(03:53)

Fair use is one of these very few legal rules which changes depending on whether people use it, right? It does. It’s like a part of your body, which drops off if you don’t use it, right? I want to make it, I want to leave this image with you. So it atrophies, I mean, it literally atrophies, you know, if you’ve ever had your leg in a cast, you know what happens to the muscles.

(04:19)

Why? Because one of the key determinants in figuring out whether something is fair use is whether your use — let’s say quoting three lines from a song, Bob Dylan’s song in a set of materials about the civil rights movement — whether your use interferes with a market for the work, you could say, “Don’t be silly, there’s no market for three-sentence chunks, three-line chunks of Bob Dylan, right? There’s no market for this, so I’m not interfering with a market for this,” so, there you go, no one’s going to say, “I was going to buy the song but now I’m going to download this,” it doesn’t make any sense, right?

(04:57)

When’s that not true? If there is a market for three-line chunks, so what happens if your spineless principal says, “License it, license it, I don’t want to deal with this, let’s make sure we clear all the rights.” And if they pay out for all those tiny little chunks which are clear fair uses, what happens? A market for that work, that little chunk comes into being. What does that mean? The next time someone wants to do it, “There is a market for this, we can sell tiny little chunks.”

(05:32)

So, your neighbor’s decision on fair use can mess it up for you, right? This is something that this is a huge lesson, I’m very glad you brought it up. And that’s why you need strong, system-wide policies in which the administrators and bureaucrats who actually control the decisions are made to have spines. There’s a forced evolution from invertebrate to vertebrate, you know, you know, you put them through the old Darwinian boot camps, it’s like, you know, the jellyfish mode is so yesterday, you need to crawl out of the sea and develop a spine.

(06:06)

One suggestion which I always make to educators is you should have a wall of shame for the most shameful decisions on clearances of fair use than your system. Librarians are your friends here, as always.

Audience member (06:18)

[Off-mic question]

James Boyle (06:27)

Absolutely. It’s not even a copyright act, you haven’t even got into the world of copyright. So it’s totally okay. Now, you don’t need permission to link. The whole point of the internet is it’s an open web, right, where you don’t need permission to link. Now, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. One, courtesy. Norms, right? If, for example, someone is providing you a publicly available free resource, let’s say my comic book, which we give away for free on the web, right? Nice PDF download, HTML download, whatever you want, right? It is courteous to link to the front page where the person can decide whether to buy it or to take the free. Why? Because it encourages people to make socially responsible decisions about doing it **. If you link directly only to the free version, you’re giving people disincentive to do that, so it’s both courteous and wise to do that. Second thing, and it’s also a kind of attribution often — people often put the attribution up there, if you link directly to it, you may take that away. That’s not a legal matter, that’s just a matter of doing the right thing, being polite.

(07:41)

The second thing, some sites will actively discourage deep linking with completely bogus copyright theories and other kinds of theories not even to do with copyright, because they claim you’re bypassing their advertising. Those claims are on shaky ground, shaky legal ground. So I don’t think you really need to deal with them. The only time where you do need to deal with them is where you’re doing a large-scale scraping of data off somebody else’s site. By which — so let’s say you have a machine that will take down every price on eBay and put it on yours, so you can say, this is the cheapest way to buy kettles. Here’s the eBay one, here’s the Yahoo one, here’s the whatever. eBay will sue not for copyright infringement, but for this incredibly bizarre doctrine called “trespass to websites.” Which basically says, “You came in and walked all over my web server and made it do things that I didn’t want you to do.” It’s a bad decision, it’s anti-competitive, but there you go.

(08:41)

But that’s not the kind of stuff a teacher’s going to be doing. So almost any kind of deep linking is fine. Now there are countries which have occasionally, in other countries, there occasionally have had decisions which question that, but I think the overwhelming line of authority is the one I’ve described. You don’t have to pay for linking. Not only do you not have to pay for linking, where you need to use a fragmentary version of the material in order to make it comprehensible. For example, you want to know that there is a high quality reproduction of Monet at this particular site. You can have a thumbnail image, right, because how do you describe. It’s the painting with the yellow and the sunflowers and the whatever? Nope, just a little thumbnail. That is also fair use. There’s a strong case on that. So thumbnails are okay. We should stop. Let’s stick with the material. Thank you so much.

Contents

Chapter 1. But there will be porn, piracy, and crazy people!

Meet Dr. James Boyle professor and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Public Domain as he recalls what it was like 10–15 years ago when the invention of a computer network was being discussed. (begins 0:25, lasts 8:44)

Chapter 2. Do giraffes really have the same number of vertebrae as we do?

Where would you find the answer to this question ten years ago? Dr. Boyle explains how the Internet has become the factual resource the world has ever seen was created as well, as why Google dominates the Internet. (begins 9:09, lasts 10:18)

Chapter 3. With enough eyeballs all problems are shallow

Most of the web runs on open-source software where there is constant peer review. Dr. Boyle shares his vision of creating a place for teachers all over the world to have access to clever ideas and lesson plans. (begins 19:27, lasts 10:10)

Chapter 4. Everyone’s sock drawer is on the world wide web

Today, people share everything on the web from their photos to their personal opinions, but we do not have a system that is completely available on the open web nor a set of systems that makes it easy to use. Dr. Boyle discusses how Creative Commons allows people to publish their own material and make it available to others. (begins 29:37, lasts 10:24)

Chapter 5. I can do whatever I want but it’s all illegal

One of the reasons we do not have a centralized location for educational resources is that it is not clear how one can use such information while following copyright law. Dr. Boyle addresses these issues via his comic book and through websites developed by MIT and Rice University. (begins 40:01, lasts 8:04)

Chapter 6. How can we screw all of this up?

All of us are smarter than one of us and the publishers of educational materials and resources are beginning to realize that open source accessibility can threaten their business. Dr. Boyle believes that K–12 public education will benefit the most from sources online and sharing with others from all over the world and must be vigilant against proprietary, commercialized educational resources that use closed architectures. (begins 48:05, lasts 8:29)

Chapter 7. Questions

Dr. Boyle answers questions from the audience. (begins 56:34, lasts 9:46)