Universities, the Internet, and the Intellectual Commons
Professor Hal Abelson*
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Universities have a mission to create, preserve, and disseminate
knowledge. In addressing that mission, we should take care to preserve
and strengthen the intellectual commons -- the shared wellspring of
ideas and innovation from which all may freely draw.
Today, both the intellectual commons and the university communities that
rely upon it are confronting stresses from both within and outside the
university: squabbles over who owns academic work, technologies that
impede the dissemination of knowledge, and the impact of increasingly
stringent and overreaching intellectual property laws.
This talk describes initiatives aimed at bolstering the intellectual
commons, both at MIT and elsewhere. These include MIT OpenCourseWare,
an effort to publish the materials of all MIT courses for free use
worldwide, the DSpace Federation for institutional research publication
archives, and the Creative Commons project to promote sharing on the
Internet.
*
Hal Abelson is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
He is winner of several teaching awards, including the IEEE's Booth
Education Award, cited for his contributions to the teaching of
undergraduate computer science.
Abelson's research at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory focuses
on "amorphous computing," an effort to create programming technologies
that can harness the power of the new computing substrates emerging from
advances in microfabrication and molecular biology. He is also engaged
in the interaction of law, policy, and technology as they relate to
societal tensions sparked by the growth of the Internet, and he is
active in projects at MIT and elsewhere to help bolster our intellectual
commons.
Abelson is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation and a
founding director of Creative Commons. He also serves as consultant to
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. At MIT, Abelson is co-director of the
MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology and co-head of
MIT's Council on Educational Technology.