[Oer-community] On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license

[Stephen Downes]

Hiya all,


When I asked Richard Stallman about the use of open licenses for
educational materials, first he complained because I didn't use the word
"free", then he said that he wasn't interested in educational content,
that his arguments applied specifically to software. Clearly his views
have been modified since then, as this post attests.

Without extending this into a full-blown debate, as I have already
written at length about this elsewhere:

- licenses that allow commercial use are /less free/ than those that do
not, because they allow commercial entities to charge fees for access,
to lock them behind digital locks, and to append conditions that
prohibit their reuse

- works licensed with a Non-commercial clause are fully and equally open
educational resources, and are in many cases the only OERs actually
accessible to people (because the content allowing commercial use tends
to have costs associated with it)

- the supposition that works that cost money can be 'free' is a trick of
language, a fallacy that fools contributors into sharing for commercial
use content they intended to make available to the world without charge

- the lobby very loudly making the case for commercial-friendly licenses
and recommending that NC content be shunned consists almost entirely of
commercial publishers and related interests seeking to make money off
(no-longer) 'free' content.

The problem with this is the Flat World publications or the OERu
assessment scenario - content deposited with the intent that it be
available without cost is converted into a commercial product. It's not
free if you can't access it. Content is different from software, it can
be locked (or 'enclosed') in ways free software cannot, without
violating the license.

In sum, this discussion would be better conducted without further
debated about which open license 'is best' and especially with fervent
declarations in favour of commercial-friendly licensing. The suggestion
that the free sharing of non-commercial content is not 'practical' is
not Stallman at his best, and is refuted by the experiences of millions
in the field.

-- Stephen




On 2012-11-26 3:58 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga wrote:
> An interesting text by Stallman, which I copy bellow and emphasize
> some points in italic. See also the article on permission culture at
> Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_culture
>
> *On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license*
> <http://stallman.org/articles/online-education.html>
>
> Prominent universities are using a nonfree license for their digital
> educational works. That is bad already, but even worse, the license
> they are using has a serious inherent problem.
>
> When a work is made for doing a practical job, the users must have
> control over the job, so they need to have control over the work. This
> applies to software, and to educational works too. For the users to
> have this control, they need certain freedoms (see gnu.org
> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>), and we say the work is
> "free" (or "libre", to emphasize we are not talking about price). For
> works that might be used in commercial contexts, the requisite freedom
> includes commercial use, redistribution and modification.
>
> Creative Commons publishes six principal licenses. Two are free/libre
> licenses: the Sharealike license CC-BY-SA is a free/libre license with
> copyleft <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft>, and the Attribution license
> (CC-BY) is a free/libre license without copyleft. The other four are
> nonfree, either because they don't allow modification (ND, Noderivs)
> or because they don't allow commercial use (NC, Nocommercial).
>
> In my view, nonfree licenses are ok for works of art/entertainment, or
> that present personal viewpoints (such as this article itself). Those
> works aren't meant for doing a practical job, so the argument about
> the users' control does not apply. Thus, I do not object if they are
> published with the CC-BY-NC-ND license, which allows only
> noncommercial redistribution of exact copies.
>
> Use of this license for a work does not mean that you can't possibly
> publish that work commercially or with modifications. The license
> doesn't give permission for that, but you could ask the copyright
> holder for permission, perhaps offering a quid pro quo, and you might
> get it. It isn't automatic, but it isn't impossible.
>
> /However, two of the nonfree CC licenses lead to the creation of works
> that can't in practice be published commercially, because there is no
> feasible way to ask for permission. These are CC-BY-NC and
> CC-BY-NC-SA, the two CC licenses that permit modification but not
> commercial use./
>
> /The problem arises because, with the Internet, people can easily (and
> lawfully) pile one noncommercial modification on another. Over decades
> this will result in works with contributions from hundreds or even
> thousands of people./
>
> /What happens if you would like to use one of those works
> commercially? How could you get permission? You'd have to ask all the
> substantial copyright holders. Some of them might have contributed
> years before and be impossible to find. Some might have contributed
> decades before, and might well be dead, but their copyrights won't
> have died with them. You'd have to find and ask their heirs, supposing
> it is possible to identify those. In general, it will be impossible to
> clear copyright on the works that these licenses invite people to make./
>
> /This is a form of the well-known "orphan works" problem, except
> exponentially worse; when combining works that had many contributors,
> the resulting work can be orphaned many times over before it is born./
>
> To eliminate this problem would require a mechanism that involves
> asking _someone_ for permission (otherwise the NC condition turns into
> a nullity), but doesn't require asking _all the contributors_ for
> permission. It is easy to imagine such mechanisms; the hard part is to
> convince the community that one such mechanisms is fair and reach a
> consensus to accept it.
>
> I hope that can be done, but the CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses, as
> they are today, should be avoided.
>
> Unfortunately, one of them is used quite a lot. CC-BY-NC-SA, which
> allows noncommercial publication of modified versions under the same
> license, has become the fashion for online educational works. MIT's
> "Open Courseware" got it stared, and many other schools followed MIT
> down the wrong path. Whereas in software "open source" means "probably
> free, but I don't dare talk about it so you'll have to check for
> yourself," in many online education projects "open" means "nonfree for
> sure".
>
> Even if the problem with CC-BY-NC-SA and CC-BY-NC is fixed, they still
> won't be the right way to release educational works meant for doing
> practical jobs. The users of these works, teachers and students, must
> have control over the works, and that requires making them free. I
> urge Creative Commons to state that works meant for practical jobs,
> including educational resources and reference works as well as
> software, should be released under free/libre licenses only.
>
> /Educators, and all those who wish to contribute to on-line
> educational works: please do not to let your work be made non-free.
> Offer your assistance and text to educational works that carry
> free/libre licenses, preferably copyleft licenses so that all versions
> of the work must respect teachers' and students' freedom. Then invite
> educational activities to use and redistribute these works on that
> freedom-respecting basis, if they will. Together we can make education
> a domain of freedom./
>
> -- 
> Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
> Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil
>
>
>
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