Acknowledgments and Awards

Academics and Copyright

A review of the CIP's 2005 Symposium on Intellectual Property
by Patrick Ross, Progress & Freedom Foundation
June 17, 2005

I spent the day yesterday with 100 members of academia at a symposium on copyright. (I guarantee you my colleague Jim's breathing will tighten when he reads that sentence.) The University of Maryland organizers at their Center for Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment were kind enough to let me speak on a panel on P2P, joined by RIAA's Linda Zirkelbach, Penn State Professor Matt Jackson and precocious Harvard undergraduate (is there any other kind?) Matthew Gline (more in this incredible kid in a moment). Moderator Robert Brauneis of GWU knows enough on the subject to have taken the entire 90 minutes for himself, but he did the generous moderator thing and let us have the microphones.

Who would have thought that just by crossing the D.C. border into Maryland, I could leave the superficial debates that permeate this town and find myself in an environment of significantly more substantive and constructive dialogue?

I enjoyed the panel, but I enjoyed even more spending the day there and meeting some of the attendees. By and large they were university librarians or administrators, with the occasional general counsel sprinkled in. Here in Washington we argue abstract copyright issues at seminars, in Hill testimony, over cocktails at receptions, but these folks struggle with real-life copyright issues every day.

Read the rest of Patrick's post from the IPCentral Weblog...

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UCEA to Award Center for Intellectual Property

Friday, 05 March 2004

A message to UMUC community from Provost Nicholas Allen:

I am pleased to inform you that the Center for Intellectual Property, a unit of the Office of Distance Education and Lifelong Learning, is this year's recipient of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) Conferences and Professional Programs Community of Practice Exemplary Program Award. As you may recall, last year our Master of Distance Education program received UCEA's Distance Learning Community of Practice Program of Excellence award.

The Center for Intellectual Property is indeed a leader in providing pertinent professional development programs for distance education faculty in the United States, focusing on training and research on intellectual property issues that impact the development and delivery of quality educational materials for both faculty and students.

The Center has brought much deserved attention to the University through maximum enrollment in short-term continuing education programs. It has also developed online workshops led by nationally known experts and an annual onsite seminar in which intellectual property experts discuss issues such as peer-to-peer file sharing, scholarly publishing, new legislation impacting intellectual property and higher education, and the future of fair use.

The Sloan Foundation recognized and awarded the UMUC Center's work on academic integrity and plagiarism training through a grant that funded establishing the Virtual Academic Integrity Laboratory. VAIL is a Web resource for faculty and students that includes an online tutorial on academic integrity and can be accessed through the Center for Intellectual Property Web pages. Most recently, the Mellon Foundation gave a substantial award to the Center to study the impact of digital rights management systems in higher education.

Please join me in congratulating Center for Intellectual Property staff Kimberly Kelley, Kimberly Bonner, Olga Francois, and Maria Lee for their exemplary work in establishing and maintaining such a timely and vibrant resource in distance education.

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