I tip my hat to Leigh Blackall for his gutsy effort in tackling the tricky issues of using Creative Commons licenses skilfully. Leigh opened the webheads online convergence conference with his keynote talk by stepping outside his comfort zone, into the perilous waters of copyright. Leigh explains some of the unexpected restrictions that come in to play when trying to license digital content in an open way – from the point of view of a learning institution.
It’s hard going but well worth a listen and ongoing conversation. I have run into the same pain points that Leigh describes in my work with LearnDog. Having done a few rounds of this conversation myself, I thought I would try to summarise some key points:
- cc:by (attribution) is a good starting place for open content in the Creative Commons world
- cc:nc, sa (non-commercial and share-alike) seem to ‘add open-ness’ but actually bring surprising restrictions in a number of circumstances
- things get really messy when learners and educators try to re-use (remix) content, especially when hosted on commercial platforms with intrinsic license constraints
- the whole debate could go away – if the default position were non-commercial sharing: as Stephen Downes has said about Creative Commons:
it shouldn’t be necessary; the default should be non-commercialsharing, while commercial ownership and use constitute exceptions)
1 response so far ↓
1
leighblackall
// May 25, 2007 at 7:21 am
Thanks Mike. My issue even extends to CC BY SA. the Non Commercial clause is even worse! In my view. I think the CC BY is enough to “protect” original works from becoming closed. And I think we (in education) should get over our hangups on the idea that others will figure out a way to make money through derivative works. Our role is education – and as much as we’d like to control what happens to that “product”, we shouldn’t.
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