IPR for Grid Education and Training

Status of This Document

This document provides information to the Grid community on IPR for Grid Education and Training. It does not define any standards or technical recommendations. Distribution is unlimited. This is a draft version of the document, it has not yet been submitted for public comment, but is still being developed within the Education and Training Community Group (ET-CG). NOTE: THIS IS A DRAFT RECOMMENDATION ONLY AND SUBJECT TO FURTHER DISCUSSIONS. CHANGES TO THIS DOCUMENT CAN AND WILL APPEAR FREQUENTLY.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © Open Grid Forum 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

Sharing educational content is vital in order to help grow the Grid Education and Training community and effort, however, IPR issues effect both the authors and users of shared content. This document looks at issues of IPR, specifically copyright, in the context of Grid Education and Training, and introduces some possible solutions to these issues.

Contents

1. Introduction and Goals

1.1 Motivations

1.2 Contributions sought

1.3 Medical data and IPR issues

2. Intellectual Property Rights

2.1 Copyright

2.2 Fair Dealing

3. IPR and the Reuse of Educational Content

3.1 Assignation and Licensing

3.2 Licenses

3.3 Creative Commons

4. Depositors and Digital Library Provision

4.1 Facilitating the Use of Copyright Content

4.2 Deposit Licence

5. Collaborative works

6. Recommendations

7. Future work

8. Contributors

9. IPR statement

10. Disclaimer

11. Full copyright notice

12. References

13. Appendices

1. Introduction and Goals

1.1 Motivations

At its core, eScience is an inherently collaborative field so the model of sharing and collaborating in creating and improving educational materials not only fits well, but can actually provide a good case study to students in how distributed collaborative projects can work.

The sharing of materials lowers the barriers of entry for Grid educators, or for educators in scientific or other disciplines hoping to teach Grid technologies in their courses, and is a powerful tool for encouraging uptake of Grid education and training, and encouraging creativity and sharing among educational professionals already active in the Grid education field. However, in sharing these materials we must take into account copyright ownership, licencing and other IPR issues.

Many of the IPR issues relating to Digital Libraries are relatively legally untested, which has the result of discouraging people from sharing educational materials. An accepted framework for safely accomplishing this sharing should allow educators to be more confident in their ability to share and reuse materials. This document aims to inform educators and content creators about the issues involved in sharing educational content and also to give them confidence that solutions exist which take into account these issues.

1.2 Contributions sought

One of the goals of this document is to encourage others to think about these problems and to develop their own innovative solutions, hence this should be taken as a discussion document which should spark further work in the area.

1.3 Medical data and IPR issues

However, there are many legal and ethical issues surrounding the sharing of personal medical data which make it difficult to share such data across institutional and national boundaries.

This document does not concern itself with the special IPR issues relating to medical data, we merely wish to highlight the existance of these issues and the need for them to be addressed at a later date.

2. Intellectual Property Rights

2.1 Copyright!

Copyright, a form of IPR, comes into effect when a work is created. In the UK, for example, there is no need to register copyright, the copyright law protects the copyright holder automatically when the work is created. For a particular work to be protected under copyright, it must be recorded or rendered in a particular form, for example printed format, sound recording, etc. Copyright grants exclusive rights to use the work such as copying, distributing, broadcasting and modifying. The precise extent of these exclusive rights may vary across jurisdictions, for example, EU Copyright Law includes rental rights.

Copyright may be owned by the authors of the work. However, copyright of work created during the course of an employment is generally owned by the employers. Some organisations choose to implement a lax IPR practice, for example, universities typically permit academics to take some form of IPR ownership; the academics are free to conduct IPR agreements for the sake of publications, e.g. to give away the rights of research outputs to publishers. However, this practice should not be taken for granted, especially if the works concerned have financial and competition implications.

2.2 Fair Dealing

A breach of copyright occurs when an act related to one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owners is performed without their consent. However, most copyright laws provide a defense called "fair dealing" that enables limited use of work without explicit permission. For example, you could typically use work for private study and non-commercial research and include it in other works through attribution of the copyright owner, e.g. by means of citation. It is also feasible to copy a reasonable proportion of the work for educational purposes. However fair dealing is largely subjective and ultimately up to the arbitration in courts if the owner believes that a breach has occurred. Hence the use of fair dealing needs to be treated with care.

When it comes to the internet, there is a misconception that most work is in the public domain, i.e. that it is free to use. Actually the opposite is true and most works are covered by copyrights and terms of use. Due to the pervasiveness of internet technologies, the act of uploading content to digital libraries and sharing it online is equivalent to publishing, broadcasting and distributing the work simultaneously. On the contrary, fair dealing usually permits a single copy for private use and therefore becomes inappropriate as a defense for the provision of educational content online.

3. IPR and the Reuse of Educational Content

The provision of e-science training and education is a challenging task. Not only does it depend on synthesising the outcomes from a rapidly advancing domain, it also needs to be accomplished in environments where knowledge is largely derived in cross-institutional, multidisciplinary and international contexts. Facilitating knowledge transfer in such environments is problematic and labour intensive. Making educational content accessible online with mechanisms for enabling content sharing, derivation and reuse thus becomes vital to enable the achievement of economies of scales in large-scale collaborative collation and production of content among the e-science communities. This requires the IPR issues to be addressed since the aforementioned actions correspond to the exclusive rights of the copyright holders.

3.1 Assignation and Licensing

Two models are possible for sharing copyrighted material:

• Assignment where the owner transfers ownership
• Licencing where the owner grants a licence for particular uses.

Copyright assignment is quite common, for example within the publishing world, where a copyright holder or author normally signs away their exclusive rights to the publisher in order to have their material published. This is a costly way for the copyright holder to have their content published since they effectively lose ownership and in many cases end up having to pay for access to their own work later. This is also one of the reasons behind many existing open access and and self-archiving initiatives within the education sectors.

Licensing on the other hand allows more control from the copyright holder's perspective. It does not involve the transfer of ownership but rather, it grants permission to perform some or all of the exclusive acts in conditions determined by the copyright owner.

3.2 Licenses

There are two basic types of licenses: exclusive and non-exclusive ones. An exclusive license permit gives the licensee a sole right which no other person has, for example, exclusive broadcast. A non-exclusive license grants the same right to different licensees for the same use of work in different use scenarios. There are also a number of options in drawing up licenses, for example, you can employ a lawyer and legal firm or you can adapt standard licences.

The ICEAGE Digital Library (http://library.iceage-eu.org) is piloting a policy and services involving content depositors granting non-exclusive licences based on standard licences. The Creative Commons licence is used by default with certain conditions set. The licence permits non-commercial reuse of material so long as the copyright owner is acknowledged and shared derivative works use the same licence.

3.3 Creative Commons

The standard licences useful for sharing educational content are those from the Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation. Creative Commons (CC) licences are used throughout the world with the licenses ported to 34 international jurisdictions including the US and 9 major EU countries. There are also generic/unported licences.

All Creative Commons licenses follow a set of baseline rights. In addition to the baseline rights, the licenses can be customised according to three conditions, whether the work can only be used non-commercially, whether it can be modified and whether it must be licenced under the same licence if derivative works are redistributed. The combinations of the optional conditions have resulted six standard Creative Commons licences. All the licences require attribution to or acknowledgement of the copyright owner. The following are some characteristics of CC licences:

• Enable and encourage reuse
• Copyright owner must be acknowledged
• Use restrictions are feasible: non-profit use only, no derivative works
• Derivative works can be distributed under the same licence (ShareAlike) or no specific condition (licence does not include condition for distributing derivative works)
• No requirement to distribute derivative work
• Flexible and can be used as a template for other form of licence, e.g. BBC Creative Archive Licence (restricts content use to UK only)

The ICEAGE Digital Library currently uses a CC licence for all content generated as a result of the project. It is based on the Attribution-Noncommerical-ShareAlike licence. ICEAGE also acknowledges that there will be cases in which depositors would wish to opt for other licences. The digital library currently allows depositors to pick other Creative Commons licences and also other project licences such as one from EGEE[2].

Attribution is the most important baseline requirement of all CC licences. This means proper citation of the authors of content submitted to the repository when it is reused. The CC Licence deed typically contains a hyperlink to the original work which all derivative work must cite. Apart from this, there are recommendations for other citation mechanisms, such as the use of logos or branding (a generic statement acknowledging the work) within the derivative works. Currently the CC licence deed (e.g. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) contains the names of the content creators (authors) as hyperlink to the original work if the deed is referenced from within the ICEAGE digital library (the original work details). To minimise the risk, the attribution may include more than the author name, given that uncertainties related to the rights of author in granting licences within institutional employment. Hence it may be necessary to acknowledge the funding organisations and employers within the licence deed. For the ICEAGE Digital Library this can be done by additional metadata, e.g. adding the funding organisations and employers details within the creator (author) metadata field. The ICEAGE digital library has mechanism to enable the CC deed automatically include all creator names. Appropriate branding can also be provided in the description (details page) of original work to which all derivative work would refer. However, such additional metadata and branding may be not necessarily attainable given the general nature of metadata provision within digital libraries. Making the availability of employer details and branding mandatory may entail additional barrier for people to submit content.

4. Depositors and Digital Library Provision

There are various user roles and therefore different IPR considerations within the use scenarios of digital library provision. In general, all end users must observe and abide by the use conditions associated with the content under specific licences, such as making the appropriate attribution (linking to the original works) when deriving works. The group of users with the most significant IPR implication is the depositors who would contribute and upload materials to a repository hosted within a digital library environment. Depositors should only submit to the repository materials for which they hold the copyright or are otherwise entitled to submit. Typically depositors can either be the copyright holders, e.g. the authors (content creators), and designated proxies such as librarians who are within the bounds of law to submit materials.

4.1 Facilitating the Use of Copyright Content

The feasible options for handling ownership of materials in digital repositories correspond to the two generic mechanisms for sharing copyrighted content:

1. Depositors retain copyright ownership but grant either exclusive or non-exclusive licenses (licensing).
2. Depositors hand over copyright ownership to the digital library or a designated organisation (assignment).

The second option may significantly decrease the volume of depositions as many content producers who may be permitted to submit their work to a repository would not be permitted by their employer to give away the copyright to that work. However, this option would simplify issues such as licencing. If the copyright is signed over to a designated organisation then this would mean that the copyright holder could not later change the licence terms under which the material is made available. This requires the digital library to assume the publisher role. An alternative option is for the digital library to recommend an appropriate organisation to which the copyright is to be handed over, but the depositor would be free to refuse this. However, it remains unclear how the copyright assignment may be facilitated online or indeed if it is currently technologically viable. Furthermore within the contexts of institutional employment, it is often not clear who is permitted to conduct copyright assignment. It would be necessary to determine who within the universities or other institutions is responsible for giving permission to transfer copyright. For a digital library facilitating content sharing among multiple organisations and international contexts, the solution would be costly if not impossible. However, this may be feasible for projects such as the EGEE which has conducted prior IPR negotiation and obtained permissions regarding copyright assignments from its participating institutions.

For digital libraries in general, a more practical approach is to employ a licensing mechanism via one of the following use cases during content submission:

• Depositor grants licence by submitting their own licenses or selecting from a list of off-the-shelf standard licences such as the Creative Commons.
• Repository specifies a default licence to which the depositor must give consent.

If depositors supply their own licences then the repository should display the licence along with the download and have the consumer agree to it before they can download the materials. Using a single licence makes it easier to understand and easier for consumers to know what their rights are, however, most projects producing content already have licences and may not want to distribute their work under a different licence. Requiring a particular licence may restrict them from submitting material.

Currently in the ICEAGE Digital Library, the chosen solution is to have a recommended licence, but to also allow depositors to use their own licence if they prefer. Versions of the creative commons licence are made available and depositors are encouraged to use these, but any licence will be accepted.

It is worth noting that licences are not exclusive so material can be licenced under multiple licences.

An issue remains in that the depositors may not be aware that they may not be legally permitted by their employers to conduct copyright/licencing agreement. Since in many cases the depositor, even though they may have created the work, does not in fact own the copyright to their work, rather it is owned by the employer or the project which funded the work. This is the case in most universities and companies in industry. This risk is reduced if they must only licence the work rather than assign ownership, as organisations and institutions are more likely to permit licencing than ownership transfer.

4.2 Deposit Licence

In addition to licensing, there are other considerations the digital library must address. In general, it is necessary for the digital library to take reasonable precautions to ensure that the depositor is entitled to deposit materials, however, as there is no copyright listing such as exists for patents, it is not actually possible to check this. Instead the most common approach is to have the depositor agree to a declaration at deposition time, in the form of a "deposit licence".

While the content licences grant rights to consumers, the deposit licence is an additional requirement for a digital library facilitating a repository service. It is an additional agreement between the digital library and the depositors who are now responsible for obtaining the relevant permissions. By agreeing to this licence during file submission, the depositors are declaring that they are either the owner of the copyright (e.g. the author) or have the permission as a proxy to submit the content to the repository. The repository has a duty to ensure that the depositors' assignment of rights is well-informed, thus the declaration should state that the depositor understands the issues and that they're aware of what the copyright ownership for the materials are. The licence sets out the terms under which the digital library will host materials on the copyright holder's behalf. This includes getting permission to distribute multiple copies of the material over the internet. It also includes other statements such as disclaimer about IPR liability.

The ICEAGE digital library has drafted and put in place a trial deposit licence which is included in appendix A of this document. Feedback on the applicability of this licence to the broader Grid education community would be appreciated.

Despite the use of deposit licence, a policy and procedures are still required to handle infringements. This usually involves a statement indicating that the digital library will remove any work which was not properly deposited, for example, if the depositor wasn't the copyright owner of a work submitted. A mechanism must be implemented to remove materials where infringements occur. Derivative work must also be considered and will most likely also need to be removed, so the mechanism should allow for all derivative work to be removed or perhaps made unavailable until it is possible to edit it to remove the portion derived from the materials in question.

5. Collaborative works

• many licences under which materials might be distributed explicitly forbid modification and redistribution of materials
• who is the copyright owner for collaboratively produced works?
• successive compositions make it harder to cite works

6. Recommendations

Based on experiences in the ICEAGE project, and informed by the issues above, we can make some tentative recommendations on approaching the copyright issue in a Grid Education and Training context. These recommendations may not be universally applicable, but should be considered as a first attempt at defining common practice and later best practice in the area.

Feedback from other individuals or organisations with experiences in this area would be invaluable.

The following recommendations are proposed:

1. The Creative Commons licence should be the recommended licence for digital repositories of Grid Education and Training materials.
2. Where appropriate, depositors should be permitted to upload their own usage licenses, but where this is done then the repository must ensure that all reasonable efforts to explain this usage licence to users downloading the material is made.
3. A separate deposition license or agreement is also required and this must be clearly displayed whenever a depositor attempts to upload new materials, the depositor should have to explicitly agree to this licence before they can upload materials. An example of such a licence is included in appendix A of this document.
4. Any digital repository of Grid Education and Training materials should attempt to facilitate citation of work by users downloading the materials, this can be done by including appropriate metadata containing details of the author and copyright holders, etc. This is particularly important where the author is not identified in the materials themselves, which is often the case.
5. All metadata should be based on international standards such as Dublin Core in order to facilitate querying, harvesting, federation, etc.
6. Repositories should allow materials to be searched by licence type, or to be searched with a licence type filter in place, to ensure that consumers can easily find materials which are available under a particular licence. This should reduce the danger of, for example, a consumer accidentally modifying and distributing materials which were originally distributed under a licence which prohibited this.
7. A FAQ or short explaination of the potential issues should be provided for depositors. This should explain common problems which might arise when depositing materials, e.g. it should point out that the depositor's employer may hold the copyright for the materials, and should remind depositors to check the licences of any material which they may have reused in the creation of their material, etc.
8. A simple mechanism is required to remove or block materials and derivative works in case of disputes.

7. Future work

It would be valuable to get input from other organisations who have tackled this area and created digital repositories of Grid Education and Training materials. Specifically we would appreciate

• Feedback from digital library curators in different jurisdictions
• Feedback on the applicability of the ICEAGE trial deposit licence: http://library.iceage-eu.org/depositAgreement.jsp to other projects

8. Contributors

• Ben Clifford, University of Chicago, US.
• Bernhard Schott, Platform Computing GmbH.
• Boon Low, National eScience Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, UK.
• Christoph Erdmann Pfeiler, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany.
• David Fergusson, National eScience Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, UK.
• Deitmer Erwin, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany.
• Donal Fellows, University of Manchester, UK.
• Elizabeth Vander Meer, National eScience Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, UK.
• Gergely Sipos, MTA Sztaki, Hungary.
• Kamie Kitmitto, University of Manchester, UK.
• Kathryn Cassidy, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
• Kilian Schwarz, GSI Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung mbH, Germany.
• Malcolm Atkinson, National eScience Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, UK.
• Morgane Artacho, National eScience Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, UK.
• Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnia de Madrid, Spain.
• Peter Halfpenny, ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science, UK.
• Rüdiger Berlich, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany.
• Steve Brewere, OMII Europe.
• Thomas Prokosh, GUP, Joh. Kepler University Linz, Austria.
• Torsten Antoni, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany.
• Toshihiro Suzuki, Oracle.

9. IPR statement

The OGF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. Copies of claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification can be obtained from the OGF Secretariat.

The OGF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice this recommendation. Please address the information to the OGF Executive Director.

10. Disclaimer

This document and the information contained herein is provided on an “As Is” basis and the OGF disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including but not limited to any warranty that the use of the information herein will not infringe any rights or any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

11. Full copyright notice

Copyright © Open Grid Forum (2006-2008). All Rights Reserved.

This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the OGF or other organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing Grid Recommendations in which case the procedures for copyrights defined in the OGF Document process must be followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than English.

The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be revoked by the OGF or its successors or assignees.

12. References

1. ICEAGE
2. EGEE
3. The ICEAGE deposit Agreement Licence (latest version) http://library.iceage-eu.org/depositAgreement.jsp
4. http://www.intrallect.com/cie-study/index.htm
5. http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/
6. http://trustdr.ulster.ac.uk/outputs.php

13. Appendices

Appendix A: The ICEAGE deposit Agreement Licence

DEPOSIT LICENCE 1.0 (Draft)

COVERED WORK

I would like to deposit my material, referred to below as "Work" in the ICEAGE Digital Library. "Work" is covered by this agreement and when I deposit my Work in the future, whether personally or through an agent, I agree to the following:

NON-EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS

Rights granted to ICEAGE through this agreement are entirely non-exclusive. I am free to publish the Work in its present version or future versions elsewhere.

USAGE

I understand that work deposited in the ICEAGE digital library and its metadata will be accessible to a wide variety of people and institutions - including automated agents - via the Internet.

I understand that once the Work is deposited, it will be made available for sharing, reuse and derivation according to:

• The use license as chosen by me (if specified), otherwise
• The default ICEAGE Library use license

Metadata for the Work will be made available according to Creative Commons Attribution license.

Removal of the Work from the digital library or changes of use condition for the Work can be made after discussion with ICEAGE Project Officer.

I AGREE AS FOLLOWS:

• That I have the authority of the authors and/or copyright holders to make this agreement, and to hereby give ICEAGE the right to make available the Work in the way described above.
• That I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the Work is original and does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe upon anyone's copyright.
• ICEAGE accept no liability for any breach of intellectual property rights, or any other right, in the material deposited.