development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[email AT greglondon.com]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 13:18:51 -0500 , "Alexander, Bryan" wrote:
> Many college faculty have the sense of copyright as something external to
> them.  An edu license could bring it home, as it were.

3 replies so far, and they all say the same thing:
More teachers will contribute under a license
that has the word "Educational" in its title.

And those contributions won't be going into a 
public commons, they'll be going into a much SMALLER,
"education only" pasture, where people can only
use works for educational purposes and only students
and teachers will likely make any contributions 
to the works.

Do you not see the cost of doing this will 
likely mean most works will be vanity works?
Works contributed by a professor, used in 
his/her class only, with typos / improvements
only to be contributed by his/her students?

You are cutting off the majority of teh population
that would benefit from these works and therefore
you are cutting off that population from making
any CONTRIBUTIONS to those works that would BENEFIT
those works.

A simple CC-BY-SA license allows EVERYONE access
to the work. And everyone benefits from using the
work, meaning ANYONE could be a likely contributor
TO the work to improve it. An education only license
takes "everyone" and reduces to a tiny fraction of it.

If the only real excuse for the education only 
license is its easier to convince teachers to
contribute works under such a license, then 
the time and energy spent coming up with an 
education-only license would be better spent,
in the long run, on EDUCATING THE TEACHERS 
so they understand that the benefit of a public
commons only comes when the entire public can
use and contribute to the works, not just a small
minority.

My perl training manual is CC-BY-SA. Anyone can 
use it. If everyone can use it, the potential
for fixes and contributions to improve it are
far better than if I limit it to CC-BY-TeachersOnly
or something similar. If a company decides to 
offer print-on-demand books of my manual, don't
you think they'd want it to be the best possible
manual? And any changes they make to it would still
be licensed under CC-BY-SA, still in the public
commons. Non-educational uses will not take a 
sharealike work out of the commons. Commercial
uses will not take a sharealike work out of the
commons. 

A new license isn't needed for educational works.
What's needed is a better explanation so teachers
understand their works will benefit more under
a public license rather than a education only license,
that with the whole world reading their works,
all bugs are shallow, and every person becomes a
possible contributor to make their works better.