Do the intellectual property rights to student work produced in the normal activities of a regular course belong to the student or to the University in which the student is enrolled?

Should taking (and paying for) a college course be considered a “work for hire” arrangement? Well, if a student is taking certain courses at UH-Manoa’s Academy for Creative Media, that student is required to assign all copyright of her work produced in the course to the ACM.

The’ve got the owlish Lawrence Lessig slinging too, excerpted:

But what is clear is the lesson ACM is teaching: That you, the creator, deserve no creative- or copy-right for your creativity. That right should be owned by the man. And while (at least so long as you’re good) the man might grant you a nonexclusive license to your creativity, don’t even think about the idea that what you create is yours to control. Copyright at ACM at least is not a right grant to “authors,” it is a right taken from the authors by the University.

I SO want to do a beer bong with Lawrence Lessig again!

During my time here at bigwidesky I’ve been flummoxed by the number of businesses – decision-makers, actually – who are intrigued by our ideas, but are hesitant to act, nay, hesitant to decide to act. I think they have the same reaction and attraction to our ideas that I have to breakdancing.
Since all things O.B. intrigue me, I found a couple Strategy+Business articles that provide decent context for the behind-the-scenes conversations that are possibly torturing the intrepid decision-maker, of which we are not privy (here and here – free registration required).
I found several useful insights and analyses in the “7 Types of Organizational DNA” and “The New Complete Marketer”. Notably:

Decision rights are unclear. More than half of those completing surveys indicated they believed that the accountability for decisions and actions in their organizations was vague.
and
Execution is the exception, not the rule. Fewer than half of all respondents agreed that “important strategic and operational decisions are quickly translated into action” in their organizations. Poor information flows seem mostly to blame.
and
Staying ahead of the curve means moving beyond the usual approaches to draw consumers in, and agencies must partner with their clients to find the best mixes of media and formats for doing that. “We are moving from technology push to consumer pull, from push marketing to co-creation, from idea manufacturers to consumer experiences,” says Keith Pardy, senior vice president of strategic marketing, brand management, and consumer relationships at the Nokia Corporation. “If you have to push advertising to consumers, you are out of business. Advertising has to be context-relevant. And whatever you do, add value to popular culture and do not patronize the audience.”

Then it hits me: It isn’t necessarily true that companies – err, decision-makers – are change averse; they don’t understand the intricacies of their organizations well enough to embrace change confidently and make a decision that affects numerous lives, the bottom line, and the future of the company. Choice theory is at play, thwarting our efforts to effect change and get buy-off from our prospective clients.
We can’t fight it, so how do we work with it? Three legged races? Red light, green light? An inter-office scavenger hunt?? Is our obsession with creating incredible ideas simply ahead of its time? How do we comfort the VP of Marketing and assure them the organizational anemoscopes we use are ISO 9000 certified (and not obsolete)?
Those breakdancers make it look so easy!

Henry is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. I read one of his books several months ago, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide” and it was very much one of those right-book-at-the-right-time kind of things. The book is about the ways in which new communication technologies are empowering and encouraging participation in media by people who would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do so. It also discusses the gamut of response to these new possibilities; some welcoming, some smug, some fearful.
But I thought of Henry, because I knew he’d be thinking about how the whole YouTube/CNN debate format is appears to be an almost watershed moment for these technologies. And he’s blogged an edifying post about it.
To wit:

In the 1990s, an alternative — the town hall meeting debate — emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question — and why they ask it — is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective — the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can’t get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses — Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were “individuals” who “made a difference.”
What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying “I feel your pain” a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

It seems that increasingly, the prize will go to those who know how to navigate this new media landscape. And by that I don’t mean those who learn to game the system, I mean those who recognize that the transparency it creates demands that they be genuine humans.

He’s joined Deloitte & Touche USA LLP “with a mandate to establish a major new research center in Silicon Valley…[to]…explore key business issues created by the intersection of business strategy and information technology.” The content of the post is dominated by an explanation of the questions that will inform the mission of this center. Concerning the question, “What if there is no equilibrium?” he suggests:

Here’s the paradox: at the same time, we cling to traditional equilibrium concepts and institutions that emerged and prevailed in more stable times. Nathan Mhyrvold highlighted in his talk yesterday the contrast between the exponential advance of technology performance and the linear thinking of most executives. Clayton Christensen got the attention of the business world with his perspective on disruptive innovation – but even that is a punctuated equilibrium view – it holds on to the assumption that equilibrium will eventually return.
A more specific question might be: what are the institutional architectures required to operate in a world where there is no equilibrium? Early conventional wisdom suggest that these architectures should focus on agility and flexibility, but that misses the real opportunity – balancing agility with the persistence and stability required to build and deepen long-term trust based relationships. Being able to discern what needs to change and what needs to remain stable may be the greatest challenge of all…

From where I sit, his questions seem to be pointing at a still somewhat inchoate body of interpretation about what is going on with business and technology and marketing communications. I don’t think he’s without some vision of where he thinks the future lies. For my part, I think it has to do with something more subtle than the “democratization of the market” trope that is being advanced by some.
I just think it’s an incredible set of questions and worth reading.

Marketing, of necessity, treats the market as an abstraction. Thus, the customer is an abstraction. I’m willing to wager that people don’t mind being abstracted, they just don’t want to feel like an abstraction. If you’re going to try to convince a friend to try a particular restaurant, you will undoubtedly recourse to an abstraction of that friend to find the right bit of persuasive suggestion. However, when you actually talk to your friend about it, the exchange will be anything but abstract. It will take account of the shared social context, your friend’s non-verbal communications, your desire to share a new flavor, and so on. Most importantly, presuming you are anything like a decent human and you call this person a friend because you mean what is generally meant by friend, you will be speaking from your center. You will be honest. You will be human. You will be you.
This is the crack in the edifice of marketing as a paradigm. It has been there since the beginning, and no efforts to ameliorate it from within the marketing paradigm have been successful. Because marketing was a successful innovation to begin, and because its culturally totalitarian nature took time to manifest, the pressure to solve the problem of its anti-social behavior has only recently become increasingly apparent. Marketing is becoming less effective as it becomes more ubiquitous and people become more cynical. Everybody probably already knows that part.
The internet has changed everything; even though the marketers are still in the dark about it. I like to say that marketers have treated the internet like a television with a keyboard and mouse. That some marketers have been experimenting with allowing customers to create content does little to sway my opinion in this regard. I think the citizen/customer generated content (CGC) thing is a whole lot of fun and illuminating, but it does not constitute the next paradigm.
The next paradigm comes when marketers stop marketing and use these new tools to help their organizations to act like humans. The paradigm within which they’ve been operating hasn’t allowed them to do this. Now they can. Make customer service, research and development, and marketing into an organic whole so that it can assimilate these new tools. Have conversations with customers at every point of contact. It’s not democratizing the market as some have suggested, anymore than you are a democracy when you are trying to persuade your friend to join you at your favorite restaurant. It is about being human. Be accountable. Say no when you have to, but explain yourself. Apologize when you have to. Know when to apologize because you’re actually engaged in a dialogue with those you may have hurt. Give praise to those who do novel and compelling things with your products. Tell incredible human stories.
This is what creative, strategic marketers have wanted to do all along, but the marketing gestalt hasn’t made the path visible. Marketers are relegated to being the veneer of the organization—out at the edge of the process—whereas every encounter with the customer should be directly informed by the center; from the human part of the organization; from its core. The new role for marketing is in facilitating the transformation of companies from distant abstractions to human institutions. It is an opportunity for big ideas; big ideas that the big ad agencies are constitutionally incapable of conceiving.
Whatever you call that role, it ain’t marketing. Maybe it’s anthropology, as the other innovation firms call it. I just call it being human.

Update 1 – One of the panelists is apparently from VH1, because he just explained to us how “The Surreal Life” saved VH1 from irrelevance. They just showed us a clip of MC Hammer convincing Vince Neil to come back to the fold and pray to God, despite Vince’s contention that the loss of his daughter demonstrated the vacuity of prayer. The smart guy says it was a moment that transcends irony, which is a device that he says has matured and needs to be pushed past.
Update 1a – I’m starting to discern the panel’s goal. They are pushing narrative in the context of marketing, and using examples from longer format entertainment to support this notion. VH1 guy showed the “Diet Coke Break” ad as an example of good use of narrative in an ad. “I’m not saying customize ads for VH1. I’m just saying think about narrative in your commercials.”
Update 1b – One of the panelists is apparently involved in American Idol, (for which I won’t bother finding a link,) and guess what; he’s bald.
Update 1c – I just asked American Idol guy about the spoiler community and the enmity that developed between that community and the producers of the show. They put it back on me to ask what, if any, impact the community may have had on the sponsors of the show. All I could think of was to suggest that the kerfuffle surrounding the ostensible vote fraud probably had a fairly negative impact upon general perception of AT&T, a sponsor and the assumptive stewards of the phone system used for voting.
Update 1d – It turned out to be a really rather good panel. Probably the best so far. Their discussion revolved around narrative and entertainment as it intersects with marketing and advertising. A recapitulation of the Madison + Vine theme that popped up occasionally yesterday.
Update 2 – Battery died on the laptop and the condescending sound engineer at the back of the room went apoplectic when I tried to plug into his circuit. Given the paucity of power outlets, I have to offer a little criticism of the organizers for not foreseeing the need. People would want to blog such an event, yes? Why not have a power bank available for those bloggers? As a result I couldn’t liveblog the technology session. But right after I eat, I will endeavor to make something up that sounds similar to what they said.
Update 2a – So the technology panel was decent. More of the same self-serving use of the stage to show the panelists’ firms’ work. The only takeaway from it is just, know what the hell you’re doing with technology. Don’t just do it because everyone else is doing it. Don’t just jump in without consulting the experts.
Update 3 – Richard Notarianni, Executive Creative Director of Media at Euro RSCG Worldwide is now speaking about “delivery.” He’s pushing the notion that brands should be more human. He’s delineating the difference between people and brands. I’ve heard that somewhere else.
Here are some of his premises:

• Brands are Rigid and Unfeeling – People Have Likes, Dislikes, Moods
• What does your brand love? – “Monstano Loves Agriculture” anyone?
• Brands are Constrained by Markets – People Connect Beyond Geography
• Brands Seek the Spotlight – People Share the Spotlight With Others
• Brands Target Influencers – People Have Influential Friends
• Brands are Greedy – People are Generous … and Do Something About It
• Brands Build Reputation – People Elaborate
  “People have a low tolerance for repetition.”
  “Add to the story. Create incremental detail. Elaborate.”
• Brands Exist on a Narrow Plane – People Live in 3 Dimensions
  “Create physical experience.”
• Brands Are Secure In Their Categories – People Are Immersed in Popular Culture … and Have a Deep Relationship with It
• Brands have Guidelines – People have Beliefs … and Live According to Them

Update 3a – This guy has been the best speaker by far. He spoke off the cuff. His message is powerful. Too bad the audience is so small; they were clearly underwhelmed by yesterday.
Update 4 – This guy, Eduardo Braniff, CEO of Imagination is doing the “Round-Up.” I’d describe his presentation, but you can click that link and look at the picture and get everything you need to know. No, really.
Update 4a – In a moment of unselfconsciousness, Eduardo suggests we may be in a new Renaissance. His ego creeping back in, but not without some perspicacity, he said, “The agencies need to be the new Medicis.”
Update 4b – “We cannot pick and choose our battles. Great champions never say, ‘I’m going to sit this one out.’”
Update 4c – “Maybe the word, ‘marketing’ will go away.” In spite of his monotonic delivery, Eduardo said some stuff that seems to me to be right on the money.
Update 5 – Some awards are being given. The recipients have been invited to describe the work that won them the award. First up is Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. They’ve started with a video containing bits from various of their interactive pieces.
Update 5a – Now they’re showing a video of some installation work they did for Saturn. Enormous holographic people. An enormous interactive video wall. Video projections mapped to an enormous skydome and onto the surface of cars. Really great stuff. I think this is the video we just watched, but I’m not sure because the bandwidth seems to be throttled and I couldn’t continue to wait for it.
Update 5b – Then they showed the collaboration between Saturn and Google that they architected. Check it out here. And followed it up with their collaboration between Saturn and Jon Bon Jovi; Have a Nice Gig.
Update 5c – Now an award to goes to Droga5 for their work with Mark Ecko. Surprise, surprise, it’s for the Air Force One stunt. The video is the first result in a Google search for “ecko stunt,” if that tells you anything. We’ve covered this one before. Ecko actually suggests in the little documentary we’re watching that it is a political act because AF1 is a symbol of our freedoms; “…it belongs to the American people.” That strikes me as a facile and disingenuous cover for a piece of marketing. One YouTube commenter sums his thoughts on the piece; “Marc Ecko is a douche.”
Update 5d – Satchi LA (I think they said LA) is getting an award for a campaign for the Toyota Yaris. The presenter from Satchi said they were trying to be, “both laser focused and dropping H-bombs.” They did some stuff for E3, some Street Fighter tournament, some TV (only Lost and Prison Break), video on mobile phones, a video-game-in-a-banner, and a comic book. It’s clever.
Update 6 – That’s all she wrote. For my part, I think I’m gonna get outta here and go see ground zero.
Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.