development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Chris Lott <chris.lott AT gmail.com>]

> If you're afraid money will restrict the work, your fears
> are unfounded. That is the entire point of sharealike
> and other copyleft licenses. Restricting the license to
> non-commercial or education-only because of this kind of
> fear is unneccesary. It was a hard lesson learned by
> open source in the 80's, and you don't need to relearn
> it the hard way today.

Please spare me your philosophical take. I'm not interested. I'm not
"afraid" of anything. I'm aware of copyleft and other licenses.

The CC supports a "non commercial" clause and I would in turn like to
see that clarified in the light of for-profit educational use. If this
means there *should* be a second license for people who feel the way
you do, then that's fine with me.

However, I don't care for what egalitarian end the material might be
destined, if it is being CHARGED FOR then I don't want my work
licensed as non-commercial only to be used. Is
that clear enough?

The problem here is that you seem to feel that your way is the only
way, and I'm here to tell you: it's not.

> On the other hand, if you're not afraid of some commercial
> entitiy coming in and restricting your work in some way,
> if you or some other teacher wants to restrict commercial
> use of the work so that they can get money from the publisher,
> then that's your choice as well. But a NonCommercial license
> doesn't strike me as qualifying for the label "Education",
> since education means teacher/student, and teacher/student
> usually means tuition, and tuition violates the noncommercial
> restriction.

Exactly. And if this is the case, then there is a good reason to
implement an educational license rather than relying on the NC
attribute, which SHOULD deny work being used in a situation in which
tuition has been paid to access the work in question.

> The only "eduation" that can happen non-commercially
> is people reading stuff on a website and possibly
> volunteer instructors.

There are a LOT of non-commercial uses, including uses in a commercial
environment in which the resource is pointed to at a freely available
online source.

If an educational license isn't able to differentiate between the
University of Phoenix using my work and an instructor from a public
institution using my work, then it is of absolutely no use to me.
There are all kinds of scams, illegitimate, and frankly distasteful
enterprises masking themselves as education and trying to partake
freely of work that should be protected from them. The last time I had
my entire Dreamweaver/Fireworks course lifted and used-- with almost
no change-- as a $795 CBT item by some pirate outfit I decided that--
"education" or not-- there were further distinctions to be made.

c
-- 
Chris Lott