Friday notices
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Money to be made from wikis? Martin Farley has just sent the IPKat this link concerning the plan by Pearson plc to launch a commercial wiki co-authored by a community consisting of two business schools. This shows either (a) that commercial publishers have finally recognised the market power of cooperative and authoritative writing as a means of producing constantly fresh and reliable content or (b) that commercial publishers are cynically exploiting the worries of two leading US business schools (and their academic staff) as to how they can publish their materials and market themselves to future students in a changing environment.
Left: the moral of the illustration is that, if you don't make enough money from your wiki, they cut your hand off ...
The IPKat says, I'd like to see the royalty arrangements. Merpel says, with a wiki there won't be any - and as for moral rights, you can forget them entirely.
Articles for JIPLP. Co-bloggie Jeremy has received a lot of good offers of articles for the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice on (i) Google litigation and (ii) IP and green issues (see earlier request here). If you've offered an article but have not yet heard from him, you soon will. Meanwhile, the previous paragraph has just sparked off another topic.
Right: another severed hand - but the function of moral rights is to attribute the work of the hand to the owner of the head that controls its creativity
Would anyone like to offer an article on the moral rights of authors in their contributions to wikis? This is an amazing subject and Jeremy can't think of anyone who has yet tackled it. If you're interested, email Jeremy on jjip@btinternet.com and do please let him know.
Don't forget. The IPKat and Merpel remind you not to forget to have a lovely weekend.
Don't be misled by the hype about thousands of contributors. Wikis are always generated and maintained by a small number of dedicated people, often just a handful. Just check the number of contributors to any serious page on Wikipedia. I'm not sure I like the idea in any case of a book about business being created by thousands of students. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Or confusion.
ReplyDeleteThere is also something very fishy to me about a book being sold as a result of the contibutions of people being made for free. Someone is going to be making money out of the skill labour and judgment of others. I have no intention at all of allowing anyone to charge anyone else for material available on my wiki, as I want it to be a resource for everyone to freely contribute to, and freely gain from.