Last month brought an explosion of breaking news about intellectual-property issues, including copyright--the public battle over Internet-piracy bills in Congress, with ideological alliances crisscrossing standard lines, and sponsors turning against their own bills; the Supreme Court decision, "Golan v. Holder," which strengthened copyright…

Mark Anderson, a professor of philosophy at Belmont University, publishes an account of Nietzsche's life and work. He remembered liking "Friedrich Nietzsche" (Overlook Press, 2005), by the late independent scholar Curtis Cate, so he started rereading that one. But then he had second thoughts. After all, "Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical…

The ability to print a 3-D object may sound like science fiction, but it has been around in some form since the 1980s. Also called rapid prototyping or additive manufacturing, the idea is to take a design from a computer file and forge it into an object, often in flat cross-sections that can be assembled into a larger whole. While the printer on…

Universities and their inventors earned more than $1.8-billion from commercializing their academic research in the 2011 fiscal year, collecting royalties from new breeds of wheat, from a new drug for the treatment of HIV, and from longstanding arrangements over enduring products like Gatorade. Northwestern University earned the most of any…

Sarah L. Kieweg had her own nice surprise when the University of Central Florida contacted her. She understood quite a bit about her father's pioneering work on artificial intelligence in the 1990s. Still, in 2006, eight years after he died of a heart attack, at age 50, the call from the university came out of the blue: some of James R. Driscoll's…

A federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard Inc. $3.1-million last month, saying that a smaller Canadian competitor, Desire2Learn Inc., had infringed Blackboard's patent for a system of delivering course materials online. The case has been closely watched by campus-technology officials, many of whom feared that a Blackboard win could stifle…

How should colleges deal with incidents of illegal file sharing on their campuses? At the Technology Forum, aspects of that question were discussed by Cheryl A. Elzy, dean of university libraries at Illinois State University; Jim Gibson, an associate professor of law at the University of Richmond; Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for…

In March the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a preliminary decision that could have significant ramifications for universities that use course-management software, as well as for the companies that make it. The "nonfinal" decision rejects all 44 claims Blackboard Inc. made for its controversial patent of an online-learning system.…

This article reports on two authors' work that has been recycled by Routledge without giving credit or royalty. When William E. Deal casually flipped through "Theory for Performance Studies: A Student's Guide," published this year by Routledge, he noticed a few familiar sentences. After taking a closer look, Mr. Deal, a professor of religious…

The long-awaited showdown between Blackboard Inc. and Desire2Learn Inc. began this month in a federal courtroom here as lawyers described the humble beginnings of two of the fiercest competitors in the classroom-software industry. The presidents of both companies, flanked by teams of lawyers, listened intently as their lawyers described how young…

"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models. Where can researchers find a guide to lead them…

Academic scholarship is a business, and just like any other business, it is driven largely by the incentive for profit. Those profits may or may not be financial in nature, but the potential for reward, whether it is measured in terms of a promotion or of intellectual property, underlies whatever people do in higher education. Academics don't…

Book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop college students from downloading illegal copies of textbooks online. One Web site, Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original books' layouts and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free…

As new technologies emerge on campuses, how can colleges avoid legal land mines? What are the areas of greatest risk, and how should higher-education leaders deal with them? In this article, three experts offered their advice at the Technology Forum: Beth Cate, associate general counsel at Indiana University, on data privacy and security; Steven…

This article reports on a conflict between the inventor of a medicine for dry eyes and the university where she worked, which highlights the pitfalls in commercialization of academic discoveries. Renee L. Kaswan, the former professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Georgia has been prodding the institution to be more aggressive in…