Abstract
Online publication of university lectures has been shifting from using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). This trend highlights some of the problems surrounding the publication of online courses. First of all, the lectures provided through OCW are published under Creative Commons (CC) license, while MOOC has no clear standard. This gives rise to a first problem which is that the CC license only complies with the copyright law system of the United States, which is not necessarily in conformity with Japan's legal and/or ethical standard. The second issue is the nature of OCW, which is also a registered trademark and has a publication structure with a potential for the involvement of patent rights. This highlights the need for an appropriate management of patent rights, as well as overall control of property rights. In solving these issues, these rights should be explained in terms of their relationship with our nation's social system. Such discussion should include the protection and restriction on “copyright and related rights”, as well as trademark rights and patent rights, and should be further extended to the issues concerning their ethical handling. This paper clarifies the relationship between the copyright and “copyright and related rights” concerning the publication of online courses.. It also sheds light on the overall management of intellectual property rights concerning industrial property rights and ethics.
