Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Anthony <osm AT inbox.org>]

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 10:09 AM, David Chart <bydosa AT davidchart.com> wrote:
>
> On 2012/04/08, at 4:31, Heather Morrison wrote:
>
>> For the
>> avoidance of doubt, educational use - teaching and learning - is
>> Noncommercial, and permitted by this Public License, while selling the
>> content for profit, or including the content in a package intended for
>> sale for profit is Commercial, and prohibited by this Public License.
>
> This is better, but I don't think this works either.
>
> After thinking about what should go in this email, I have come to the 
> conclusion that I think
> it fails because it doesn't remove doubt. I'm completely unclear on what 
> you want to allow
> and what you want to prohibit in an educational context in which the 
> teacher is being paid for
> the course (that is, a commercial educational context).

Yes.  And it becomes even more unclear if that course is online.  But
there's a bigger problem.  The license is trying to bar people from
engaging in things that they legally do with almost all other
copyrighted works.

People sell content for profit, without permission of the author, all
the time.  It's how book stores are kept in business.

> Thinking about this further, in an educational context, can't I just 
> require the students to get
> their own copies of the CC-NC material? If I'm at a university, we can put 
> it on the university
> server. They are clearly allowed to get their own copies and look at them 
> while I talk about
> them, after all. But if that's the case, there is no doubt.

This might work for CC-NC-ND.  But for the other NC licenses, what if
you want to make modifications?  Yes, you could make modifications and
then distribute the modified material to everyone, student or no.  But
even then there is doubt - making the modifications is part of your
job, and your job most likely involves private monetary compensation.
Do you have to convince the judge that you're teaching primarily for
love of teaching and not for money?  Do we even want to treat people
differently depending on their motives?