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

Downes, Stephen Stephen.Downes at nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Fri Nov 30 07:05:29 MST 2012


Ilkka Tuomi  wrote,

> Logically, CC-BY-NC is a subset of CC-BY. In this sense, it is more restricted.

Not so. No entity in the set “CC-BY-NC” is also in the set “CC-BY”.

It’s a trick of the way CC licenses were originally formulated. The designations in fact mean:
- CC-by-Commercial (CC-by-C)
- CC-by-Noncommercial (CC-by-NC)
So as you can see, the two sets are disjuncts, specially, not-C and C

The creators of CC treated ‘Commercial’ as the default. There’s no reason why they should have had to do this. They could have established the licenses the other way (indeed, the way I would have done it):

CC-by – allows all free uses, ie., no limitations on access and distribution
CC-by-C – allows commercial vendors to restrict distribution contingent upon payment

In fact, each of CC-by-C and CC-by-NC create restrictions. They create different sets of restrictions, which may be more or less limiting, depending on your perspective.

The ‘commercial-by-default’ world in which we live is something recent and something that has been created through the use of language and the setting of assumptions. The creation of a ‘non-commercial’ clause is a way of setting ‘commercial’ as the default. It makes it seem as though ‘commercial’ implies no additional restrictions. But it’s just a trick of language, just a trick of perspective.

That’s why it’s false and misleading to say that ‘CC-by-C’ is ‘more free’, and why people shouldn’t do it.

-- Stephen


Stephen Downes
Research Officer | Agent de recherche
National Research Council Canada | Conseil national de recherches Canada
Institute for Information Technology | Institut de technologie de l'information
100 des Aboiteaux Street, Suite 1100 | 100, rue des Aboiteaux, suite 1100
Moncton, New Brunswick | Moncton (Nouveau-Brunswick) E1A 7R1
Tel.: (506) 861 0955
Fax: (506) 851 3630
Stephen.Downes at nrc-cnrc.gc.ca<mailto:Stephen.Downes at nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>

Government of Canada | Gouvernement du Canada

From: oer-community-bounces at athabascau.ca [mailto:oer-community-bounces at athabascau.ca] On Behalf Of Ilkka Tuomi
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2012 4:28 AM
To: oer-community
Subject: Re: [Oer-community] On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license

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


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