[cc-education] OLPC Thoughts

Stephen Downes stephen at downes.ca
Mon Jun 19 10:19:19 EDT 2006


Hiya,

My own thought is that the purpose of licenses addressed at specific 
target groups, such as kids, is:
(a) to create a market of customers used to receiving a certain sort of 
content
(b) to charge commercial access fees for the same content outside that 
market.

So my own inclination is not to support such licenses. I see no reason 
to start charging a person for content just because they turn 18, and 
have no interest in supporting a mechanism that makes this possible.

Just my view.

-- Stephen


AYO KUSAMOTU wrote:

>Here are some of the thoughts expressed so far :
>
>1. New (Kids-Only?) License(s)
>
>   The creation of a new CC licenses or licenses that
>allowed free
>   reuse of work by children only. This would
>conceivably be used by
>   folks trying to license their content for children.
>There are other
>   licenses, like the developing nations license, 
>that might
>   conceivably be modified for OLPC use.
>   
>2. Rewording Existing Licensing Descriptions for
>Children
>
>   An organized effort to reword or rewrite the
>current descriptions
>   of CC licenses so that they are understandable by
>children.
>
>3. CC-Connected Publishing Tools
>
>   A project to ensure that OLPC-created authoring and
>publishing
>   tools are able to speak and express CC-style
>metadata out of the
>   box.
>
>4. Statement/Position in Favor of Free Access of Kids
>Works 
>
>   A principled statement or position in favor of free
>and fair reuse
>   and a plan to build this into the OLPC platform and
>software
>   without bogging kids down in a licensing and
>copyright discussion
>   that intrudes upon content creation.
>
>In our short conversation in Cambridge, we seemed to
>think that the
>second, third, and fourth items were each things we
>wanted to pursue.
>
>The first item was not something that we were
>particularly interested
>in pursuing for a number of reasons. These range from
>general concerns
>with license proliferation to concerns about
>enforceability to the
>lack of a stated by desire by content producers for
>such a license.
>
>Most importantly IMHO, a "kids-only" license seems to
>contradict our
>previous statements to software producers against
>well-intentioned
>not-quite-free/open software because it would not
>create a platform
>that would be able to grow up with the children.
>
>I think we would be best served to work closely with
>CC to help them
>rewrite their license descriptions so that kids can
>understand them
>and to help integrate the ability to deal with CC
>metadata into the
>publishing tools in OLPC software.
>
>
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-- 
Stephen Downes  ~  Research Officer  ~  National Research Council Canada
http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen at downes.ca         __\|/__ Free Learning




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