MIT sticks to its DRM course

If you were a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers and managed to get a paper published in that organization's journal, wouldn't you be distressed if you found out that students and faculty at the country's best school couldn't get access to it? That's where things stand at the moment, as the SAE refuses to fix a collection of DRM restrictions that make their material journal non grata at MIT.

MIT's commitment to making information freely available has become legendary; for instance, many among us are familiar with their OpenCourseWare initiative, which is putting the school's entire curriculum online under a Creative Commons license for anyone who wants it. The SAE's DRM, at the other end of the usage spectrum, required that students download a plug-in (one that doesn't work for Linux or Unix machines) and prevented them from printing any page more than once. That's an interesting stance in an era where academic publishing is experiencing incredible pressure from the Net as well as from a growing number of Open Access-based scholarly publications. SAE also keeps a heavy hand on information about what they've published, refusing even to make abstracts available to outside databases.

It's clear from an MIT press release on the matter that negotiations to find a middle ground on this didn't go well -- the MIT community pondered it, discussed options, and went back to SAE, which responded with an out-way-or-the-highway ultimatum. Members of the MIT community are encouraged to read the release to find out how the workaround will function, but everyone can enjoy the reaction of John Heyword, the director of the school's Sloan Automotive Lab, when told of the lengths to which SAE was prepared to go to guard their intellectual property: "Their intellectual property?" That's MIT innovation right there -- a press release with an audibly sarcastic snort in it.