development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>]

Stephen Downes wrote:

> The research doesn't bear that out. In the only large scale survey
> that I am aware of on this topic, 'educational use only' isn't
> even on the authors' radar screen. Cites:
>
> http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/
> http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/aria-deny-is5-ue36/romeo/
>
> The survey, which interviewed more than 500 archiving and
> non-archiving academics, found that attribution was the
> overwhelming desire of the vast majority. A sizable minority
> also wanted to ensure that the work was not used
> commercially.
>
> After completing the survey, the project recommended
> the following:
>
> > It can be seen that all of the DP and SP’s requirements could be met 
> > by the CC licences except ‘by prior agreement’ which could not be met 
> > by any automated system. It was therefore decided to recommend the use 
> > of CC licences to express rights over metadata as well as rights over 
> > resources.
> http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/RoMEO-Rights-solution.doc
>
> The best evidence available, therefore, does not argue
> in favour of a specialized 'educational license'. Quite
> the contrary.

It's nice to finally see some data on this, whether it seems to support 
my position or not! Having said that, I have to question the 
applicability of the data. ;) The paper opens "The RoMEO Project aimed 
to generate some simple rights metadata by which academics might 
describe the rights status of their open-access research papers 
(eprints)." I do not argue with what the data says at all, but I wonder 
how closely a professor's feelings about their "open access research 
papers" (when they have always had to sign away copyrights to these 
papers in the past) reflect their feelings about their syllabi, lecture 
notes, problem sets, animations, and other educational materials (which 
they have traditionally held tight, perhaps obsessive, copyright over). 
The feeling might be similar, but it might not. I don't think there is 
any good reason to believe that public school teachers' attitudes match 
those of university professors, so I don't believe the data tell us 
anything about them. Finally, these data pretend to tell us nothing 
about the group I am most interested in -- the hobby-ists and others who 
will create and share intersting educational materials outside the 
mainstram academic context.

<snip>

> To reiterate:
>
> - The 'educational institutions only' license is not needed,
> despite speculation to the contrary, and
>
> - Addition of an 'educational institutions only' license
> weakens the concept of Creative Commons as a whole.

Both these objections focus on the 'educational insitutions only' option 
in the license. I asked before, but am still very curious to know, if 
the removal of that option would make the license draft acceptable to 
you. Please let us know.

D