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License to share
I’ve been a little hesitant to write about open education licensing issues here, because I’ve found the discussions can quickly get distracting, but I’ve come across two different blog postings that illustrate some of the issues, so it’s a good opportunity to point to them.
One post is by David Wiley, and it discusses the issue of license incompatibility. One reason for publishing under open licenses is to permit others to mix the materials with other open materials to create new open derivative works. As David points out, even if many of the licenses currently being used are almost identical in spirit, the self-perpetuating (share-alike) requirements of these licenses make it problematic to combine materials published under different licenses.
The other post, one one of my favorite blogs and one that I rarely have time to keep up with–The Patry Copyright Blog, is an interesting read given where David’s ends up. The gets back to the original inspiration for Creative Commons: The length of copyright protection is too long, and it’s a bad thing for society. If copyright restrictions were more along the lines of those suggested in the post, a great deal more material would be available for unrestricted reuse and less would require open licensing.
