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If you want to know why not, read “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder,” an opinion piece in today’s New York Times. It’s about the unforeseen consequences of the Bayh-Dole act, which was meant to provide a profit motive to universities, to encourage them to transfer their scientific and technological discoveries to private enterprise as quickly as possible. As a result, the spirit of science and applied science has changed. One of the first thing that happens to students today is that they are informed that the university has rights to inventions and discoveries that come about as part of sponsored research. When I wrote some math software in 1968 that enabled users to write equations in ordinary 2-D notation and to see the graphs of those equations on a screen, I don’t think I had even heard the word “patent.” It was just not part of the vocabulary — certainly not the university’s possible interest.

If the Internet protocols were developed in a university setting today, the university would almost have to patent them and then give a single private company a long-term exclusive license to use them. The Internet would not be common property, and research at other universities would be restricted by the legal requirement that they negotiate use of the patent rights.

It’s a new world, and not a better one. Jennifer Washburn’s book, University, Inc., which is mentioned in the article, is also excellent, even though it’s a few years old now.

A major point of Chapter 6 of Blown to Bits is that copyright protections were so strengthened by rewrites of copyright law over the past decade that it became difficult even to facilitate the re-use of your creations (literary, software, or artistic), unless gave up all claims on your work and released them into the public domain. As we discuss, Creative Commons was an effort (Hal was among the founders) to allow creators easily to specify conditions under which their creations could be re-used by others (for example, that the new creation include proper attribution to the original, and that such “borrowers” must make similar requirements on those who borrow in turn).

But there has always been a bit of discomfort about the legal infrastructure underlying Creative Commons licenses. Suppose I put a CC license on my work and you just use it, ignoring the conditions I stipulated. Have you actually done anything unlawful? The theory has been that in attaching a CC license, I never gave up my copyright, and I could always go after you for infringing that copyright. But it’s a delicate matter of law and, until recently, it had never been tested in court.

Indeed, a Federal District Court in California came to the opposite conclusion about an “Open Source” license — that the creator couldn’t impose a legal requirement on the re-user by attaching the open source license. On August 13, that decision was reversed on appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the venue where appeals on intellectual property issues like this get adjudicated. Though it applies exclusively to software, an “open source” license is enough like a Creative Commons license in its intent and in what it requires that there is now much more confidence that CC licenses are legally binding.

The case is that of Robert Jacobsen v. Matthew Katzer and Kamind Associates, and the decision of the Appeals Court is here. The decision is 15 pages, and while you would need legal training to understand the subtleties, the gist of what the parties did and the court’s reasoning about its conclusion are comprehensible to an interested layperson.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google doesn’t say it wants to be the only source of the world’s information, but it has now moved a step closer to monopoly in the book search area.¬†

Microsoft dropped its book digitization project, stating “Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.¬†With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content.”

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive is “disappointed” and plans to keep up his book-digitizing efforts. But along with Microsoft’s thus far unsuccessful struggles to absorb Yahoo!, the death of Microsoft’s book-digitizing project is another sign that the company that defined the software industry is having a hard time shifting to the new economy defined by bits themselves rather than the computer programs that manipulate bits.¬†

Harvard’s University Librarian, Robert Darnton, has a good piece in the New York Review of Books on the future of research libraries. It begins, “Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?”

Nice metaphor, Professor Darnton! (Full disclosure: We were far from the first to use it. “Information Explosion” is the title of a paper by Latanya Sweeney, and the image surely wasn’t original with her either.)

While we’re at it, a tip of the hat to my colleague Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard’s open-access policy for research papers. He’s just been named head of Harvard’s newly created Office of Scholarly Communications.