Email the Editor    Email a Friend    Print this Page 

Professor Hal Abelson talks about giving away MIT courseware and other intellectual property, what's wrong with computer science and why he's proud to be a nerd.

ITBusiness.ca: In 2001, you and five others started the Creative Commons movement, devoted to offering users and creators of intellectual property new rights options. Why is it significant?

Hal Abelson: The great power of the Web is that people can share stuff and remix it and build on each other's work. But the way copyright law has evolved, it's just not well matched to the Internet. Since 1986, in the U.S., if you create stuff, at that moment, it's actually copyrighted. You don't have to register it. What that means is, if you go out on the Web and see stuff, you have to assume you can't use it. What should be a shared thing that people can use and contribute to ends up being an IP minefield.

ITB: Is it a minefield for creators of intellectual property as well?

HA: Yes, it works both ways. A lot of companies have internal documents, educational stuff that they'd like to post. But it's unclear what risks they take. So either they put on an “all rights reserved” copyright -- which technically means no one on the Web can even copy it, so I'm not sure why it's on the Web -- or they make some idiosyncratic license, and then you can't mix in things from other places.

So what [Creative Commons] makes is a standard set of licenses that are all worked out for posting things. So you can look at stuff and see what rights you have, either as a contributor or a user. There are now 140 million documents on the Web under CC licenses. At Mozilla.com, there's a menu that says, “Search for this on the Web, but only for stuff that's CC-licensed.” Or you can go to Google or Yahoo and say, “Find me stuff, but only stuff that I can reuse.”

ITB: OpenCourseWare, which offers free online access to MIT courses, is another big movement that you helped launch.

HA: In 2000, there was going to be this $2 trillion market for material on the Web, and universities were wondering, “How are we going to charge for it?” So when MIT said, “We are going to put these things up and make them free,” that was wildly countercultural. I was one of about six people who came up with this weird idea: Why don't we give this stuff away?

ITB: What's the status of it today?

HA: It's been surprisingly more successful than we predicted. We have about 1,600 MIT courses up, and sometime next fall, we'll hit 1,800. That's virtually all MIT courses.

But this was not an MIT-only operation. It really was the vision that lots of universities put up collections of what's now called “open educational resources.” There's now the OpenCourseWare Consortium , with more than 100 members.

share: