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Subject: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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  • From: David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>
  • To: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons <cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-education] Quick draft
  • Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 21:17:02 -0700

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




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