development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

David Wiley said:
> I therefore propose we rebrand the By-NC-SA as the Creative Commons
> Education License,

By education, you mean professors sitting around writing papers?
Or do you mean people who go out and teach for a living?
The difference is whether or not "NonCommercial" fits
your definition of "education".

If you license your work CC-EDU, would an instructor be able
to use that in a class? Students pay tuition to the school,
the school pays the instructor a salary. That may qualify for
commercial use. Especially if the "school" is a one person
corporation with the instructor being the sole shareholder.

If you want instructors to be able to use the material in
a paid-for class, then NonCommercial won't work, no matter
what "rebranding" you do. You would need an exception to the
"NonCommercial" restriction that would all commercial use
for "educational purposes".

At that point, not only do you have a mound of questions from
"what is commercial use", you throw in a mountain of questions
about "what is educational?"

Can someone publish the work? what if the publication charges
for its subscription? Do you make exceptions for "qualified"
educational magazines and the like?

The problem is the rebranding of NC-SA doesn't fit the
natural understanding of "education" and I think it would
lead to a lot of potential confusion.  If you're adamant
about NonCommercial being in there, then the human readable
license needs to be abundantly clear that it means
NONCOMMERCIAL only and that "education" is limited to that
definition.

What "Education" means to me would probably better fit
into BY-SA. Sharing knowledge. Share and ShareAlike.
I wrote a perl training manual and licensed it under
the GNU-FDL for its copyleft protection but it allows
commercial use so that instructors can charge students
for tuition and books.

If you wanted to rebrand CC-BY-SA as the "Education" license
then I'm all for it.

But I wouldn't agree with the NonCommercial restriction
or the confusion it would create.

Greg

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
I do not speak for Creative Commons.