development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Matthew Haughey <matt AT haughey.com>]

On Apr 3, 2005, at 3:49 PM, Sanford Forte wrote:
> What if a commercial publisher wants to take an open source project 
> into the
> commercial realm, for profit?

They can request permission of the original authors of the work, i.e., 
the whole point of sharing -- you allow free use by other educators, 
but publishers need to give them a call if they want to bind and sell 
it. This is a perfect demonstration of the power of CC licenses -- the 
folks that want to profit off your work need to contact you first, 
those working in the non-profit realm of education get access to tons 
of material to help them teach, free of charge.

> Are we to eschew significant, already-established commercial 
> educational
> publishing distribution channels just in order to "protect" open 
> content,
> and keep it "pure" of commercial distribution for profit?

Yeah, pretty much. Is there a problem with it?

> What happens of a for-profit publisher sets up a non-profit educational
> publishing arm? For that matter, anyone could do this. How does this 
> license
> deal with that scenario?

They publish all the content they want under by-nc-sa and educators can 
download, print, and use them to teach classes with, free of charge. 
That same for-profit publisher would probably still sell books. These 
two things can co-exist and I see nothing wrong with that.

> However, what happens to the educated or skilled "non-academic" who has
> substantial intellectual capital, and wants to share openly with 
> anyone who
> wants to use what s/he has created, and doesn't care how it gets out 
> there,
> as long as people are able to use it? The latter scenario is far more 
> likely
> in the long term (as content production and distribution become more 
> facile,
> and cheaper to afford). Many of the current attempts to 'boundary' open
> source content for education use may discourage those who simply wish 
> to
> create for wide-open distribution.

Those folks can license their work under anything they want. Nowhere in 
your description do I see the need to allow commercial work. You seem 
to be trying to make the point that non-commercial is incompatible with 
"wide-open distribution" whatever that means.

Matt