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

Fri Nov 30 01:28:02 MST 2012

A good conversation...

Stephen, it may be useful to distinguish between "abstract" openness and
outcomes. Logically, CC-BY-NC is a subset of CC-BY. In this sense, it is
more restricted. You are mainly talking about outcomes, i.e., whether the
licensed resources will, or will not, be more or less freely accessible to
potential users. In practice, you have to make quite a few assumptions
about the actions of the different players, which may or may not be
empirically right. E.g.:

"- 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"

As has been pointed out in the discussion, CC-BY-NC allows commerical
players to negotiate a separate license. This is a private agreement
between the parties and can, for example, contain terms that exclude other
commercial actors from negotiating similar agreements.

I think Wayne's point about MIT OCW was very interesting. From the outcome
point of view, the MIT OCW non-commercial restriction has lead to much
broader availability and use of the resources that could have been possible
without NC. More restricted can sometimes be better if the objective is
wide access.

For the growth and maintenance of the resource, the situation can be
different. The point is that if you are interested in the outcomes, you
should focus on the empirical outcomes, for example, whether different
licenses lead to enclosures of not. You might even ask whether enclosures
are sometimes useful.

I think Stallman's point about the difference between software and OER
content is relevant. In software, you adapt and redevelop functional
modules. You reuse implementations of ideas. That's why patents are
important for SW. In content, the issue is more about expression. The
author may be interested in preserving the integrity of the message. That's
why some countries have clearly separated moral rights from (commercial)
copyrights.

Best
ilkka

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:44 PM, Stephen Downes <stephen at downes.ca> wrote:

>  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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Oer-community mailing listOer-community at athabascau.cahttps://deimos.cs.athabascau.ca/mailman/listinfo/oer-community
>
>
>
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