Last century, in the eighties, and in a climate of public sector accountability driven by Thatcherism the British Government imposed a series of performance indicators upon the UK university sector. The goal was improved efficiency and quality, but the clear message was that the universities had to held accountable to the government, as representatives of the public and primary funders of the universities.

Today was the day I finally got to speak to the submission on the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill before the Commerce Select Committee.

I'm doing a lot of reading about organisational change and the role of the university at the moment and the juxtaposition of two quotes struck me rather strongly.

Burton Clark in 1998, in his book "Creating Entrepenurial Universities" quoted a very apt observation:

"a workable twentieth century definition of institutional autonomy [is] the absence of dependence upon a single or narrow base of support" (Babbage and Rosenweig, 1962, quoted in Clark, 1998, p7)

One of the very real challenges to New Zealand universities is our dependence on the Government for our funding. A large proportion of most universities budgets come from a traditional model of funding that is built primarily around our teaching activities.

I'm working my way through some papers on organisational change at the moment (writing a paper, which is why this blog has been a bit quiet) and as a molecular biologist by training I'm finding the (mis)use of the word "evolution" extremely irritating.

Hopefully those of you in Auckland are attending the InternetNZ workshop on the BIll. The Wellington one went well, although there was a certain sense of preaching to the converted - there was very little evidence of content providers defending the line being followed by the Minstry of Economic Development policy analysts.

Finally we have some movement on the revision of New Zealand's copyright laws with the arrival in the house of the "Copyright (New Technololgies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill."

The time taken to revise laws means we're not going to get another chance to improve our copyright law here in New Zealand any time soon so its important that any changes position New Zealanders strongly.

If anything is certain, it is that new technologies are going to continue to challenge our understanding of content and the existing distribution channels are going to fight to retain the status quo as much as possible, so we, as consumers and voters need to be ready to fight back.

One of the more important paragraphs in the preamble to the Bill is this one:

"[permitted acts] are provided where activity is seen as having particular social value or in circumstances where enforcement of rights would be impractical and undesirable. New Zealand is also a party to a range of international intellectial property agreements, most notably the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights [TRIPS], which place limits on the extent to which exceptions can be made to the exclusive rights."

The importance of this is as a guide to the thinking and motivation of the people who actually wrote this Bill (most certainly not the sponsor Judith Tizard) as well as the significant constraint they are placed in by TRIPS.

Had an interesting email arrive this morning from the Times Higher Education Supplement who are asking delegates of the forthcoming OnlineEduca conference the following question:

"What new technology [do you] imagine will change the lives of academics within the next decade and what the implications of that might be for universities"

The issue of student ownership of the copyright in their work and the ability to control what's done with it by universities has once again reared its ugly head. In summary, a group of students upset about the use of automatic plagiarism detection systems have tried to lay a trap to catch out their University and Turnitin. They have registered the copyright of their work (more on this below) and then submitted it for assessment with the proviso that it not be retained in the Turnitin database. Unsurprisingly, this trap succeeded and they are now suiing for copyright violation with a claim for damages of $150,000 per instance.