[cc-education] A new hope for cc.edu

Matthew Haughey matt at haughey.com
Sat Apr 2 23:44:54 EST 2005


On Apr 2, 2005, at 10:28 AM, Greg London wrote:
> Students pay tuition to the school,
> the school pays the instructor a salary. That may qualify for
> commercial use.

That seems like a pretty far stretch of the term "commercial." Almost 
comically so.

> Especially if the "school" is a one person
> corporation with the instructor being the sole shareholder.

Example? Are you trying to describe something at the edge of commercial 
training/degree services and education, like the University of Phoenix 
or something?

> If you wanted to rebrand CC-BY-SA as the "Education" license
> then I'm all for it.
>
> But I wouldn't agree with the NonCommercial restriction
> or the confusion it would create.

Let's consider a popular adopter of a hypothetical license as an 
instructor sharing lesson plans in the form of lectures and lecture 
material. Instructors are very sensitive about commercial exploitation 
of their academic work. They don't want commercial services selling 
their notes or packaging 1000 lecture powerpoints onto a CD and 
charging people for it. I know professors that disallow paid note 
takers in their class, since they don't agree with the the practice of 
someone selling notes for their course.


You've stretched the idea of commercial so far it barely makes sense, 
then you conclude that everything must allow commercial use to prevent 
future confusion. I don't know of any professors that would want their 
lectures bound by someone else and sold for profit, and so they'd 
definitely want the NC protection.

Matt





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