development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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

Chris Lott said:
> 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.

It isn't "my way". You have two options that were originally proposed.
With your mention of an education-specific license, now three.

CC-BY-SA-NC
CC-BY-SA
CC-EDU

My understanding of NonCommercial is that if money changes hands,
it is against the license. There is no difference between a
university professor and your dreaded U of Phoenix mail order diploma.
I said I may be misunderstanding the NonCommercial license,
but as far as I can tell, a professor teaching a student is commercial use.

I then explained that BY-SA would allow commercial use and answered
what seemed to be your concern about "restricting" the work.
It is now clear that "restricting" isn't what you're concerned about,
it is what you want to do to prevent U of P types from using your work.

A NonCommercial restriction would stop them but it would also stop
a university professor as well. Someone proposed the idea of a university
publisher selling the books at no profit, but I'm fairly sure that
is still against the noncommercial license.

It would also stop legitimate instructors from using the work as well.
And so I said it doesn't really deserve the name "education".

The proposal was to "rebrand" CC-BY-SA-NC as the "Education" license.
And all I've said is that if you 'rebrand' an existing license,
then SA-NC doesn't allow most educaitonal uses.

Also, if the work is ShareAlike-NonCommercial, the only
legitimate way to approve the work for commercial use is
to get the approval of ALL authors. If the work is sharealike
and has lots of contributers, this can be problematic.
Make sure no one contributes anonymously and then later
is upset that you allowed commercial use to Yale when
they went to Harvard and they despise Yale. Attribution
does not require contributers to add their name, it requires
that those who want to be added are maintained in the list
of authors.  If you get a contribution from someone to
improve your work, get their name down so you can get
an exception for commercial use from them later.

When you want to allow a publisher to print your CC-SA-NC
work and sell it for money, you'll have to get permission
from all the contributers to the work. The contributers
licensed their contributions non-commercially, and you'll
need their permission to use it commercially.

Unless you plan on being the sole author, in which case,
ShareAlike is pointless. NoDerivatives would be more appropriate.
At least then you'll be the sole author and can give
full permission on a case by case basis for commercial use
to your work. And since it's NoDerivs, no one will contribute
to the work under a noncommercial restriction. so you wont
have to worry about getting their permission later.


No one has mentioned an education-specific license until now.
Everyone has been talking about "rebranding" SA-NC to "education".
But if you want to draft a wholly separate license that somehow
discerns between "good" educational groups like universities
and "bad" educational groups like U of Phoenix, then that
opens a whole other can of worms. You'll have to deal with
a subjective definition of who is "good", and you'll end up
with a CC license that will be incompatible with any other
CC license.

i.e. if you craft a new education-only license, rather than
rebrand CC-BY-SA-NC or some such thing, then none of the
ShareAlike works will be compatible with this new Educational
license. ShareAlike won't allow the terms of the license
to be changed. Education-only would change teh terms.

Those are your options. It has nothing to do with "my way".
It has to do with the way the existing licenses work.

BY-SA will allow commercial use, and actually allows
educational use. but it will allow the dreaded
U of P to use your work.

BY-SA-NC won't allow commercial use. You'll have to keep track
of all contributers and get their permission for every instance
of commercial use that you want to allow. Or accept no contributions
and use ND-NC to be upfront about it.

BY-EDU will be incompatible with BY-SA because it will restrict
the work to "good" educational institutions only and ShareAlike
works are licensed such that you cannot add further restrictions
to the work. WHich means you wont be able to take all the current
CC-SA-NC works and roll them into a CC-EDU work. They'll have
to be maintained separately.

Those are your options. That's just the way it works.



The only thing that I've pushed that is my personal opinion
is that I don't think BY-SA-NC deserves the name "education"
because of how restrictive it is. But hey, someone proposed
the suggestion and asked for everyone's thoughts.

If preventing teh U of P is your main concern, you could
put URL attribution on it that would point to license info
for the work and express your personal distaste for U of P
and whoever might use it that you disapprove of.  Then their
students could follow the link and find out they've been
hoodwinked. The URL must contain the license information to
the work, but it doesn't mean you can't put your own opinion
there too. Keeping a URL up to date can't be more work than
keeping track of all contributers to a work, and getting their
permission every time you want to allow commercial use to
some specific user/university/whatever.

Oh, sorry, you asked me to spare you my philisophical take.
Just ignore the last two paragraphs then.