Killing off Mickey Mouse: Open knowledge, open innovation

Hall, M

Abstract

Mickey Mouse will be eighty-one next month. The anthropomorphic mouse keeps his
eternal youth through the application of patent and copyright legislation, which ensures a
constant flow of revenues from reproduction rights. Vigilant lawyers seek out and
punish transgressions in the remotest of places and lobby for extensions of protection
whenever it’s possible that this icon of entertainment could become public property.
Many others have adopted the Mickey Mouse principle. In the university world, the
primary enthusiasts are the publishers of academic journals, who have persuaded us to
enter into a strange pact. We surrender the copyright to our intellectual work, give our
time to editorial boards, and then buy back our work through journal subscriptions, the
price of which always escalates at a rate higher than general consumer inflation. As with
the custodians of Mickey Mouse, commercial academic publishers vigorously oppose the
notion that academic work should be in the public domain.
This system is contrary to the fundamental principles of the university. As academics, we
build up our reputation by giving away our intellectual property, seeking to impress our
peers and measuring our worth in terms of citations and other forms of
acknowledgement. And recent work in the economics of knowledge show how the
knowledge society benefits from what has been called “combinatorial explosions” – the
exponential increases in understanding that come when ideas come into unexpected
juxtaposition. There is a good case to be made that success in solving the hugely
complex problems of our times will come from an extensive and ever-growing
knowledge commons and an environment of open innovation. It’s time to kill off the
Mickey Mouse mentality that depends on constraints on the ownership of intellectual
property, and to trust in the power that comes from making knowledge openly available.

Citation

Hall, M. (2009, September). Killing off Mickey Mouse: Open knowledge, open innovation. Presented at Education in a Changing Environment Conference : Critical Voices, Critical Times, University of Salford

• Presentation Conference Type: Keynote
• Conference Name: Education in a Changing Environment Conference : Critical Voices, Critical Times
• Conference Location: University of Salford
• Start Date: Sep 15, 2009
• End Date: Sep 16, 2009
• Deposit Date: Oct 13, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 13, 2009
• Keywords: Intellectual property, Knowledge commons, Copyright
• Publisher URL: mms://streaming.salford.ac.uk/No_Restrictions/4ec5a62aa2717f68c2ba73c9b190f7eb1253108801.wmv
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference