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The Social Construction of Copyright Ethics and Values

Science and Engineering Ethics volume 16, pages 263–293 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

This study is based on analysis of copyright policies and 26 interviews with science and engineering faculty at three research universities on the topic of copyright beliefs, values, and practices, with emphasis on copyright of instructional materials, courseware, tools, and texts. Given that research universities now emphasize increasing external revenue flows through marketing of intellectual property, we expected copyright to follow the path of patents and lead to institutional emphasis of policies and practices that enhanced universities’ intellectual property portfolios, accompanied by an increase in copyrighting by professors. Although this pattern occurred with regard to institutions, professors offered a more varied pattern, with some fully participating in commercialization of copyright and embracing entrepreneurial values, while others resisted or subverted commercial activity in favor of traditional science and engineering values.

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Notes

  1. For example, in some countries universities are public and part of the state civil service as in Norway and Germany, although increasingly universities are being granted more autonomy and incorporated as private foundations, as just occurred in Finland. In the United States, universities are public but not part of a state civil service or private non-profit organizations, such as Harvard and Yale.

  2. For conceptions of the Humboltian university see Kweik (2002), and for U.S. land grand universities see McCarthy (1912) and McConnell (1953).

  3. For an exception to this view, see Noble (1998) history of correspondence courses, which he likens to digital diploma mills, and he sees as little different than instruction via the internet.

  4. Research universities in the United States are doctoral granting institutions that award at least 20 doctoral degrees (excluding doctoral-level degrees that qualify recipients for entry into professional practice, such as the JD, MD, PharmD, etc.) Within the doctoral granting universities are Research universities with very high research activity as measured by grants and contracts and publications, research universities with high research activity, and doctoral research universities, which grant the Ph.D., but are not deeply involved in research activity. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/index.asp?key=791. Retrieved August 2, 2009.

  5. Merton (1942) is generally regarded as offering an early and enduring formulation of scientific norms and values with his conception of science as open, communistic (later changed to communal), universal, disinterested, and characterized by a skeptical habit of mind. Openness spoke to the nonsecret character of science. Communistic or communal meant noncommercial. Universal referred to the idea that there was no national cast to science and that knowledge flowed freely across borders. Disinterestedness addressed the objective nonpartisan stance of the scientist toward knowledge. Maintaining a skeptical habit of mind challenged scientists to always question results. In the 1950s, and 1960s, Merton’s values were compressed into “basic” or “fundamental” science, and the value of science was that it was “value-free” or “objective.” These properties were often conceived as embedded in science itself and separate from the scientist, who nonetheless was value-free and objective because “he” served science. There is also a values literature approaches science from a different direction, that of the public good. Scholars like Heller and Eisenberg (Noble 1998) and Bollier (Kromery et al. 2005) make the case that science is an “intellectual commons” that must not be appropriated by the corporate or economic sector because to do is against the interest of the public good or commonweal. The intellectual commons is sustained by an academic “gift economy” which is open, free, nonalienable (and very Mertonian). These very properties allow science to flourish. To enclose the intellectual commons is to destroy it, wreaking havoc on the very system that created the science and technology that gave rise to the new/knowledge/information economy. Corporate values are understood as opposed to the public good because they stress profit for individual firms rather then the well being of society as a whole. There are many critiques of Mertonian work on scientific values. Critics of corporate America and Marxists, neo-Marxists, and post-Marxists have seen close connections between science and business, with the result that science often served commercial values (Veblen 1918; Noble 1976; Soley 1995). Opponents of the Vietnam War saw science as the servant of war, the capitalist state, and the imperial ambitions of U.S. leaders (Clark 1998; Foreman 1987). Social constructionists challenge the notion that science is separate from the scientist or that it embodies pure and noble ideas (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Dasgupta and David 1987). Much social constructionist work focuses on laboratory life and the values and practices that animate and characterize it, such as competition for discovery, status, and resources. Actor-network theory explores the agency of individual actors and groups, who through various complex networks are engaged in the social construction of practice, reality, and policy (Callon 1986; Latour 1987; Law and Callon 1992; Mulcahy 1999). Some scholars do not critique Merton, but argue that Mertonian values and market values are not in opposition. They argue that the connection between science and business should not necessarily be viewed critically (Stokes 1997; Branscomb and Hart 1997; Branscomb 1997) and see science not as serving the (unspecified) public good but rather as serving (unspecified) economic prosperity, redefined as the public good, which more easily enables the coexistence of market and academic values. They value market capabilities of science.

  6. Merton (1942) associated science with democracy and wrote to challenge the rise of nationalistic, Fascistic Nazi science, much of which was secret because associated with weapons research or the concentration camps. He did not anticipate the rise of secret or classified science, justified in the name of national security that developed with the advent of World War II.

  7. See footnote 4 for a definition of U.S. research universities based on the Carnegie classification. The Association of American Universities s (AAU) is an association of 62 leading public and private research universities in the United States and Canada. Membership in AAU is by invitation and is based on the high quality of programs of academic research and scholarship and undergraduate, graduate, and professional education in a number of fields, as well as general recognition that a university is outstanding by reason of the excellence of its research and education program. The AAU was started in 1900. http://www.aau.edu/about/default.aspx?id=4020.

  8. We also studied anthropologists, but have not included them in this paper because they are not physical scientists or engineers.

  9. See Weil (2002) on culture of credit, where she analyzes the ethics of citation and attribution.

  10. We are aware that the public good knowledge/learning regime was not without its dark side—despite postulation of Mertonian values, secrecy and exclusion from knowledge, expressed as classified knowledge, were the norm in U.S. science and engineering research funded by the Department of Defense, which accounted for the lion’s share of all U.S. university funded research until 2001. See Slaughter and Leslie (1997, Chap. 2), and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004, Chap. 3) for the nuances of the two regimes and the shift to academic capitalism.

  11. Thus far, the faculty associations that have directly addressed issues of ownership are organizations such as the National Education Association, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Federation of Teachers. All these groups take the position that faculty, as the author of copyrightable intellectual property, are its owners. Generally, they do not address the more complex ethics and values issues addressed by professors in our sample. Perhaps that is because there are few faculty from research universities among their membership, and even fewer unionized research university faculty. Nor are there heavy concentrations of scientists and engineers.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the National Science Foundation Information Technology Research Program for their support of our research, Jennifer Croissant and Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter. “Virtual Values: Information Technology, Distance Learning and Higher Education.”

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Affiliations

  1. Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30605, USA

    Sheila Slaughter

  2. Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Gary Rhoades

  3. American Association of University Professors, 1133 Nineteenth Street, Suite 200, Washington, D.C., NW, 20036, USA

    Gary Rhoades

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  1. Sheila Slaughter
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  2. Gary Rhoades
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Correspondence to Sheila Slaughter.

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Slaughter, S., Rhoades, G. The Social Construction of Copyright Ethics and Values. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 263–293 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9162-1

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Keywords

  • Copyright
  • Patents
  • Intellectual property policies
  • Case studies