Compares Canadian and American legislation on intellectual property and copyright. The possible impact of further choices in copyright law is discussed in terms of the availability of an alternative legal protection for information, breach of confidence, and its possible impact on the flow of information in Canada. (AEF)

Discusses the following indicators for measuring success in mainstreaming distance education in higher education: integration, resulting in funding and credit for off-campus students; course ownership, providing legal protection for faculty; product differentiation among institutions in course offerings, quality, and flexibility; flexible time…

Focuses on the role of digital libraries as facilitators for the use of digital information and describes Walden's Paths, a directed path facility that allows teachers to incorporate Web-based information into their high school curriculum. Discusses teacher training, intellectual property issues, and metadocuments. (LRW)

Increased appreciation of the commercial value of intellectual property has triggered a major debate on college campuses, focusing on two issues: ownership of intellectual property and use of copyrighted works in teaching and research. Because these raise faculty-rights issues, faculty must identify its claims and interests clearly and make itself…

Provides an overview of information policy, including its importance, its key instruments, and its complexity. Information policy issues that may create new roles for libraries include the ramifications of the public's right to information, the organization and retrieval of electronically networked information, information literacy training,…

Describes the challenge of redefining the fundamental concept of a "document," focusing on information professionals' apprehensions about changes in information generation, control, and access, and the future of the information professions. Topics include bibliographic control, professional roles in electronic publishing, intellectual…

An anthropologist of Indigenous descent reflects on challenges confronting researchers in mainstream institutions as they pursue respectful research relationships with Indigenous peoples. Challenges include differing cultural attitudes toward knowledge and research, institutional policies on publication and intellectual property, political issues,…

Remember when the Internet was about opening up access to information and breaking down the barriers between content creators and content consumers? Think back to when spam was just a meatlike substance. To those heady days when Timothy Leary was predicting that the PC would be the LSD of the nineties. Before the DMCA. Before eBay. Back when the…

Using a patented drug during clinical trials is not infringement [35 U.S.C. 271(e)(1)]. Merck v Integra enlarged this "safe harbour" to accommodate preclinical use of drugs and patented "research tools" if "reasonably related" to FDA approval. The decision allowed lower courts, should they wish, to find any use of a research tool, except for…

The purpose of this research was to explore Google's potential for detecting occurrences of word-for-word (1) plagiarism in master's theses. The authors sought answers to these questions:1. Is Google an effective tool for detecting plagiarism in master's theses?2. Is Google an efficient tool for detecting plagiarism in master's theses?The first…

Biotechnology and nanotechnology are both strategic technologies, and the former provides several lessons that could contribute to more successful embedding and integration processes for the latter. This article identifies some of the key questions emerging from the biotechnology experience and summarizes several lessons learned in the context of…

The last quarter-century bore witness to a sea change in academic involvement with commerce. Widespread university-based efforts to identify, manage, and market intellectual property (IP) has accompanied broad shifts in the relationship between academic and proprietary approaches to the dissemination and use of science and engineering research.…

The Internet is the world's largest knowledge common and the information source of first resort. Much of this information is open and freely available. However, there are organizations and companies today that are trying to close off the Internet commons and make it proprietary. These are the "copyright controllers." The preservation of the…

The day is past when educators can legitimately claim ignorance of digital copyright and fair use laws. The ed tech community has addressed digital copyright and fair use a lot in recent years. There is still, however, the ongoing challenge of keeping up with ever-changing statutes as technology itself matures, not to mention the necessity of…

Is it feasible and appropriate to develop a sustainability metrics which captures cosmological-spiritual dimensions of un/sustainability? Departing from the supposition that the crisis of unsustainability is a crisis of worldview and misguided cosmology which needs redirection on a cultural and global scale, this essay introduces the notion of a…