development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Palmer <davidpalmer AT westnet.com.au>]

Hello Greg,

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 04:46, email AT greglondon.com wrote:
> 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.

This is true.
They will.
Identification is the first step in a successful sales procedure.
> 
> 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.

I see your point and agree, with the proviso that the student spectrum
definition will be much wider. Although the degree of accessibility of
the material will not be as great as it could be, it has the potential
to be far greater than before.
> 
> 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.

As a member of the Debian project for some time now, I empathise
completely with what you are saying. The unreserved open source option
is also the option I would endorse given the opportunity. Unfortunately
that opportunity doesn't exist here, only a small evolutionary step
toward it. You cannot ask anymore of the giver of the gift than what
they are prepared to give.
> 
> 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.

To ask someone, from one of the more conservative sociological sectors,
to take their lifework and throw it into the public arena to be torn
apart, modified, rebuilt would be an extremely daunting prospect for
them and anathema from their point of perception.
Their work is the sum total of their existence thus far. It is closely
tied to their sense of personal identity, and to ask them to (what
appears to them to be) just throw it away with the prospect of it being
destroyed, is a process that I doubt that many of them would be capable
of aligning themselves with.
> 
> 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.

In this paragraph, you state the case in a nutshell.
But, people must learn to walk before they attempt to run.

I am in total agreement that the licence is insufficient to what is
truly required, but it is at least one small step in the right
direction, and once that step has been taken, and the essence of the
buddhist principle of 'letting go,'the release that comes from the
'giving up of possession' is realised, then the process will continue  
at the rate of progression that the individual is capable of aligning
him/herself to.

I am of the opinion that Descartes' philosophy as developed by way of
Bacon and Newton, has given us a _great_deal technologically, but it has
also endowed us with a way of seeing that imposes the factor of
fragmentation, and the breaking down of the holistic, interdependent
whole that has been the cause of the degree of alienation evident in the
way in which we create degrees of differentiation within the global
social structure, within the subsets within that social structure, and
even within ourselves.

And no, I'm not a buddhist, before anybody rushes to allocate a
definition of me. I attempt to operate within as few paradigms as
possible.

So, to sum up, Greg, this whole licence situation could well be exactly
that - a process of education for the educators.
They don't need it, many of them will tell you, but any educator that
believes that they do not need to learn any further, and moreover,
mostly from their own pupils, has already lost the primary quality of a
good educator as far as I am concerned.
If you find the situation frustrating, consider that you are presently
in the company of probably the most enlightened of the educator sector,
and you may realise the full potential for culture shock.  
> 
> My perl training manual is CC-BY-SA.

Ah, someone from the darkside.
Will you still be able to read your code six months from now, Luke?
Python is better.

>  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.

We are lucky.
Be patient with newbies.
Regards,

David.