development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <david.wiley AT usu.edu>]

George,

A quick ref to an earlier post, and then I'll quote the pertinent info 
below and elaborate somewhat.

http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000139.html

>    1. Who do you see as the end user of this license? – Individual?
>       Corporate? (For example, at RRC, I don’t have say on what
>       happens with most of my work. The college owns it by default.
>       I’m sure I have different selection criteria for a license than
>       an organization like a university/college. I care about being
>       able to share with others…administrators typically care about
>       preserving/creating organizational value (and learning content
>       is sometimes perceived as the point of value))
Creative Commons makes an assumption that there exists a subset of all 
content rights owners who do not feel the need to say “All Rights 
Reserved” but would rather be willing to say “Some Rights Reserved.” My 
fundamental assumption in backing the creation of cc.edu is that the 
size of this subset decreases as the number of rights reserved 
decreases. In other words, most people want to reserve most rights, 
there are only a few people who would be willing to reserve only a few 
rights, and there are extremely few people who would be willing to 
reserve extremely few rights. For example, the vast majority of movie, 
music, educational, and other content creators reserve all the rights 
available under the law with regard to their content (approximately, 
“all people reserve all rights”). By comparison, almost no one puts 
their material completely in the public domain (approximately, “no 
people reserve no rights”). This covarying relationship is true for a 
number of reasons, including desires for compensation, laws applying 
copyright by default, and the related effort necessary to release rights 
to content, among others.

If this is true, then there are probably a number of people / 
organizations who are not willing to give away all the rights which a 
standard CC gives away, but are willing to give away more than 
traditional copyright retains. What licensing mechanism serves this 
group of people? What happens to their content currently? By default, 
they just sit on traditional copyright.

Another group of people who I have mentioned before are those who for 
moral or ethical reasons don't believe in Debian Free Software Guideline #6:
**
<quote>
6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a 
specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program 
from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
</quote>

I have a number of friends who would freely release materials for 
learning support if there was a way to keep governments or militaries 
from making use of them. The genetic research above is another example, 
there are countless others. CC.edu discriminates against all fields of 
endeavor accept education. In other words, by reserving more rights than 
the standard CC license the CC.edu becomes acceptable to more people 
than the CC.edu, resulting in an increase in content available for 
educational use.

>    1. How will the license be “internationalized”? I know CC is doing
>       something with this
>       (http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/) …how does
>       this relate to your goals?
CC.edu will eventually participate in the project, but nothing is 
happening right now.

>    1. What do you feel has been the impact of the CC license? You’re
>       obviously much closer to this than most on this list. I operate
>       my blog/site/articles on this license. So do many other
>       bloggers. I’m curious to see what impact this license has had
>       (talk about a huge wide open question…:)). I never think of
>       it…and the presence of it on other’s sites doesn’t change my
>       linking/quoting habits.
The main impact, IMNSHO, has been its integration with systems like 
Movable Type. I would love to see the day that Dreamweaver, Powerpoint, 
or other commonly used content creation tools had an option for CC 
licensing and CC.edu licensing. One benefit of having a CC.edu is it 
specifically draws attention from educators, while CC generally does not.

Hope that at least starts to answer your questions. Thoughts / responses?

D