development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Zachary Chandler <zechandl AT colby.edu>]

Quoting Ben Crowell <cceducrowell03 AT lightandmatter.com>:

> Dave wrote:
> >Overstating for effect is generally my sole territory, but you've done
> >it well here. =) Your encouragement of everyone writing their own
> >license would only significantly increase the confusion you wanted to
> >avoid in your last post. It also creates the same troubles OPL did,
> >namely the creation and evangelism of licenses by people with no formal
> >legal background.

> I would like to /discourage/ people from writing their own licenses, and I
> would also like to /discourage/ people from using a discriminatory license
> such as cc.edu.

ZC: First I would like to state my admiration for Ben's work, and I'd like to 
echo George Siemens's words that "we are all on the same side of the fence" 
(https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-education/2003-August/000048.html).

However, where we depart is on the point of idealism vs. pragmatism. While I 
admire your stance, I am inclined to think that cc.edu is more practical in 
terms or garnering participation. In academia I find an enormous disparity in 
what certain institutions give away for free and what others lock down with 
required student login. Information on multilingual computing - data that is 
exempt from copyright - that I give away for free (http://www.colby.edu/lrc/
help/index.html) others restrict (http://thelab.stanford.edu/students/
index.html). But especially when it comes to content, I find my colleagues 
guarding their work. That is the nut I'd like to crack, by providing an 
example 
with my own some-rights-reserved content, and (hopefully) influencing 
professors and administrators at my school, and colleagues at other schools 
-- 
for which I think we need a popular banner to fly.

I would also like to refer to David's earlier post (http://lists.ibiblio.org/
pipermail/cc-education/2003-August/000053.html) in which he states:

This is the escalation issue: we prefer licensing in this order: 
public domain, cc, cc.edu. 

</quote>

There's nothing stopping us from using and promoting the less restrictive 
licenses even though we work in education, and letting others who would 
otherwise not participate utilize cc.edu.

best,
Zach

==================================
Zachary Chandler
Language Technology Consultant
Director, Language Resource Center
Colby College
Waterville, Maine 04901  
http://www.colby.edu/lrc/
zechandl AT colby.edu
207.872.3898