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cc-education - Re: [cc-education] Re: A new hope for cc.edu

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

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  • From: Matthew Haughey <matt AT haughey.com>
  • To: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons <cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-education] Re: A new hope for cc.edu
  • Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2005 18:46:12 -0700

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







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