Archive for the ‘Open licenses’ Category

And while we’re doing the cartoons, here’s Creative Commons cartoon explaining what Creative Commons is all about:

Here’s a cool tool if you find yourself remixing Creative Commons content while you’re doing a school project or making up lecture notes: CC Taiwan has create this license compatibility wizard. Helped me settle a discussion at work the other day…

William Patry gives his take on the lifting of one of the darkest clouds hanging over open source software.  The New York Times covered this as well.  A judge recently ruled that SCO, a software company, had no claim to some of the underlying code in UNIX, contrary to its long-held assertion.

This claim has been one reason many companies had been skittish about open source software–the nightmare scenario being they would wake up to find out one day that the software they thought was open source was actually proprietary and suddenly have to pay steep licensing fees.

While an exact analogy for open education would be problematic, the scenario is nonetheless instructive, as it’s not a stretch, given the current liberal intellectual property practices of many faculty, to imagine some materials under full copyright might slip–intentionally or not–into supposedly openly-licensed materials, exposing downstream users to some risk.

I’m not a lawyer, so this may not be an exactly accurate reading of potential risk, but one of the more interesting ways this might happen with content is through application of fair use.  Materials protected by full copyright might legitimately be included in an open publication in the context of fair use (a careful publisher would note the full copyright status of such materials).  Downstream users mistaking them as openly licensed, however, might remix the materials into a different context that is not defensible under fair use, thus exposing themselves to litigation.

This is just one illustration of the many complexities surrounding open licensing of content.

…continues on David Wiley’s iterating toward openness blog. Here, David presents a four point explanation of why the new license he’s proposed is different that the CC By license. There are thought-provoking responses at the bottom of the explanation. For more on the reaction to David’s proposal, go here.

Here’s an update on recent activities of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Foundation, now three years old, created the Open Knowledge Definition, which it describes thusly:

The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) provides an answer to the question: what is open knowledge? It puts forward, in a simple and clear manner, principles that define open knowledge and which open knowledge licenses must satisfy.

The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have ‘open access’ journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.

In such circumstances it is important to preserve compatibility, guard against dilution of the concept, and provide a common thread to this multitude of activities across a variety of disciplines. The definition, by providing clear set of criteria for openness, is an essential tool in achieving these ends.

…to David Wiley’s windup: The release of a new OpenContent License draft. At first you might be thinking “Why another open license?” but as David explains the point is to reduce license incompatibility by providing a license that can be used with materials under other open licenses.

The preamble is a great explanation of the issues surrounding open licenses, remix and reuse. He’s right that compilation is often confused with what he calls rework, or alteration of the original to create a derivative, and the data on open license distribution is quite interesting.

The open question in my mind raised by the license, which will be answered in part by the license’s reception, is: Are the majority of educators currently sharing content openly really interested in making their materials available for “frictionless” remix with no limitations? The license data would indicate no, but the argument against that data is that those choosing such restrictive licenses don’t understand the problems caused by restrictive licenses and if better educated, would choose less restrictive licenses. It will be interesting to watch the adoption of this license as an indicator.

Computerworld is running an interview with MIT Professor Hal Abelson, who had a hand in launching both Creative Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare. Few have thought as long and hard about open licensing and open education as Professor Abelson. Here’s a taste:

The great power of the Web is that people can share stuff and remix it and build on each other’s work. But the way copyright law has evolved, it’s just not well matched to the Internet. Since 1986, in the U.S., if you create stuff, at that moment, it’s actually copyrighted. You don’t have to register it. What that means is, if you go out on the Web and see stuff, you have to assume you can’t use it. What should be a shared thing that people can use and contribute to ends up being an IP minefield.

As the debates about the incompatibility of open licenses rage on, it brings home to me again how they are really just a stop gap while the real battle is on carving out space for meaningful fair use and limiting copyright terms. The Wall Street Journal carries this account of how Google and others are pushing back against content producers’ attempts to limit fair use of their content. Here, the article discusses the infringement warnings at the beginning of books, movies and run during broadcasted sports events:

Many warnings “materially misrepresent U.S. copyright law, particularly the fundamental built-in First Amendment accommodations which serve to safeguard the public interest,” the complaint alleges. CCIA President Ed Black said the warnings create a “chilling effect,” dissuading consumers from using portions of the content in ways that are lawful.

The conflict illustrates the shifting concept of fair use in the digital age. “Fair use” of intellectual property revolves around the question of how much, if any, of movies, books, music and other creations can be used without permission of the owners. As Internet platforms have made it easier to redistribute chunks of content without asking for approval, copyright owners have become more protective about enforcing their rights.

With robust fair use, open education would rely less on open licenses. The good news here is that many of the most ferocious defenders of long copyright terms and narrow fair use are also business models that are dying painful deaths at the hands of other forces in the digital era, so I have hope that eventually companies with interest in less copyright protection (such as Google) will begin to hold sway over the old line media on these issues. (via Open Access News)

Creative Commons announced ccLearn on the Creative Commons blog the other day. Here’s the mission as articulated in the announcement:

Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

• With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
• With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
• With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.

The language of “advocate”, “promote” and “encourage” is a little less concrete than the missions of some of CC other undertakings, so I’m interested in seeing how the project develops. One concrete element of the project that will be a great contribution to the OER world is the Open Education Search.

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.