Archive for the 'licensing' Category

OER Copyright Survey

Published
by
Garin Fons
on August 25, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, licensing and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

CCLearn and Open.Michigan are working together to study the ways in which copyright law plays a role in the practices of those who create or help facilitate the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). It is our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the degree to which OER practitioners and users grapple with copyright law issues, and whether those issues pose barriers to the creation, dissemination, and reuse of OER.

We invite you to share your perspectives by taking the OER Copyright Survey and to read more about the study on the Copyright Exceptions and Limitations section of the OpenEd website. The survey should take only 10 - 15 minutes of your time.

If you know of other colleagues - especially individuals outside the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia - who would be interested in participating in this survey, please forward it to them. The survey closes on August 31, so we encourage all to fill it out soon!

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 0 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.

Not Again!

Published
by
Terri Bays
on September 15, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, education, intellectual property, licensing, mit, ocw, open, opencourseware, press coverage, remix, reuse and sharealike
. 0 Comments

Very nice article by Noam Cohen in Sunday’s NYT about Connexions, an OCWC affiliate member and leader in the open textbook movement. Cohen starts with an account of R. Preston McAfee’s decision to allow free downloads of his economics textbook (or low-cost print-on-demand from Lulu and Flat World Knowledge) rather than with a traditional publishing house. McAfee is protesting both the high price of traditionally-published textbooks and their market-driven content.

The article then justly commends Connexions for its “broader effort” to allow users to “rip burn and mash” course material. I am cheering right along until Cohen uses the remix issue to contrast Connexions’ work with “other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T.“ Okay, so he’s not talking about most of us, and now we’re going to hear about the evils of .pdf, right? No. . . Cohen tells us that the big difference is that “Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited.”

Huh?

It’s admittedly a tough thing to explain in short space. And it’s even a tougher thing to make interesting to the average reader.

But this article gets it wrong, and I’m compelled to set the record straight once again.

What we have here is a mash up of concerns. Connexions does use the Creative Commons Attribution license, which is broader than than that used by MIT and many other OCW’s, on account of its not requiring either a non-commercial use or license compatibility. The Share-Alike clause is the point of concern, because can complicate the mixing of materials originally published under incompatible licenses (and here the non-commercial clause can come into play as well). But complication is not the same as prohibition, and we would do well not to let our internal disagreements over optimal licensing blur that fact, especially when we are addressing our potential users.

The fact is that OpenCourseWare projects, including those under the CC share-alike license, have had a lot of success on the reuse and redistribution front, as attested to the hundreds of courses that have been localized and translated around the world.

I do not want to downplay the legitimate concern that undue complication of the remix process might prevent its happening at all. We should and do engage in lively debate about what licenses will strike the right balance between the desires of producers and the convenience of users.

But it’s important to be clear on the essentials. The average reader of the NYT article surely walked away with an erroneous impression of what we do here. And to the extent that reader was a potential OCW adoptee, everybody loses.

Newcomers’ Breakfast

Published
by
Terri Bays
on April 26, 2008
in creative commons, educational, licensing, ocw, ocw consortium, ocwc, oer, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware, presentations, remix and reuse
. 0 Comments

Below is a link to the slides from the Newcomers’ Breakfast we hosted just prior to the OCWC Meeting in Dalian. Please note that much of the detail drops out when you view them online, but it’s really there and can be viewed if you download the slides to your desktop (mental note: work out slideshare-friendly formatting for the future) . Much thanks to Tom Caswell, Meena Hwang and Clay Whipkey for their contributions as co-presenters!

http://www.slideshare.net/tbays/newcomers-breakfast

Terri

What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?

Published
by
Garin Fons
on March 26, 2008
in copyright, licensing and open
. 0 Comments

Peter Suber Photo cc BY:2.5 (PatrickD)
Peter Suber Photo CC-BY (PatrickD)

Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College and Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), recently gave a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society entitled: What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access? To learn more about ways universities can promote open access to research literature and, perhaps, use Suber’s arguments to promote open courseware initiatives at your university, visit the Berkman Center’s interactive page. You can also access slides of the event here.

United Nations University OCW licensing

Published
by
Timothy Vollmer
on February 7, 2008
in licensing, opencourseware and sharealike
. 1 Comment

It’s been reported numerous places that United Nations University has ramped up their OpenCourseWare project. An interesting aspect of the UNU OCW initiative has been the release of course materials under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The majority of other OCW projects have chosen to publish their materials under a version of the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. The debate about open licensing options continues (and hopefully will prompt more discussion here). While the CC-BY license is in essence more “free” from the get-go, it lacks the viral nature of the ShareAlike clause, which ensures that downstream remixes of content also remain free and open.

Full disclosure: I am a part time employee of Creative Commons, but do not endorse or recommend any specific CC license here or in any of these postings.