Liveblogging the Future of the Law School Casebook workshop part 3

Matt Bodie is moderating a discussion on "Competing Online Architectural Formats: advantages and disadvantages." One of the big elephants in the room regards intellectual property and what the role of the professor will (and won't) be in that future.

Take the jump with me here...

Susan Case describes making her book available for free on the Web, which has become incredibly popular and led to speaking invitations, etc.

Daniel Albohn (Sony) is demoing our submitted memos on the Sony Reader. Why is the screen so small? Maybe take a look at the iRex iLiad.

Skover: before recepticles become useful, we need to answer -- what kind of platform do we want to have for containing these digital packages.

Joel Thierstein: what's our ethical obligation to make our content open?

David Vladeck wonders how many law professors expect to make money from casebooks? Leslie Levine (West) responds that the motivating force seems instead to be (usually) about getting information out there and

John Palfrey suggests dividing up the analysis into three pieces: (1) the authoring; (2) the platform; (3) the recepticle. We should design a system that is at least dual-purpose -- (a) for students, and (b) enable a standard mode of copyright transfer.

JP's suggestion strongly seconded by Ron Collins. Imagine a platform that allows both proprietary and open information available for remixing. This need not be a war between those who want to give it away and those who seek some renumeration for their work.

I noted that in addition to fiscal renumeration, authors will want reputational returns as well.

John Mayer: www.eLangdell.org. How about creating a pool of money to pay authors to create texts, just as CALI does with lessons? over to Joel...Connexions likewise has a teaching commons, with CC-attribution that allows for collaboration with publishers. back to John... What about SSRN as a source of teaching resources? How about Connexion's model of buying a statistics textbook, funded by a foundation, that now is being remixed by professors and potentially even published at a price.

Craig (Concord) -- frustrated that the technology is all there. Why must we re-invent the wheel because the publishers and appliance manufacturers are "tying our hands" because they want to be the only platform.

Some confusion now arising over what "open source" means -- distinguishing open access from open source.

Heidi Hellekson (West) is responding to the question, pointing out that they've been heavily pushing DRM. [ This didn't seem to be the actual demand from the audience ]. Leslie (Lexis) points out that they are not stopping independent authors from self-publishing; John Chatelaime (Aspen) adds that the academy -- the authors -- need to start releasing their rights. Third-party copyright holders have presented a major obstacle.

JP is describing Harvard's open access initiative and repository (see also Duke et.al.) to alleviate this problem on the production side.

David Skover argues that professors should start asserting their market power to keep their copyright. Bill McCoy (Adobe) notes that the larger publishing industry is getting over these problems -- deal.

Kraig -- we're both the licensor and licensees -- can't we join these interests here?

Greg Silverman -- content production today can be quite complicated with many collaborations; don't underestimate the expense of such.

Why not just collect links to cases, articles? The cases are out there, but the editing-down is a clear value-add. (But is it enough?)

Paula Lustbader wants to know what the law students are doing -- are they reading the articles? notes? cases? Steve Friedland suggests we add these questions to our end-of-class surveys.

Do students demand it in electronic format? Conrad: They want something they can own, control -- and if we experiment, we can learn from their reactions.

Official writeup of Session 3