Kevin – Some good pointers on how to explain the power of openness and make the case for open courseware can be found on the open courseware consortium site at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/share/howto/index.html – maybe useful, it’s still an uphill battle …

That said, if you’re trying to move toward openness a CC-SA license is so universally misunderstood by faculty that it is a show-stopper. It’s also a show-stopper with university counsel. They just flat don’t get it, and I don’t know how you begin to cross that chasm. it’s a catch-22. To understand it you have to live it, and if you’ve never lived it…

Given that the many educational activities are funded by public money — in other words, non-commercial activities — there is an unfounded belief that long-term sustainability of open educational resources will be enhanced if they are restricted to non-commercial activities. Understandably, there is an inherent fear within the academy that naked capitalism could monopolise and consume the well-intended efforts of open content creators. Educators fear that corporates will make a profit from their intellectual efforts and at face value it seems reasonable to apply a non-commercial restriction to the licence. However, the inclusion of the NC restriction has the undesireable effect of closing down an open educational resource in unintended ways.

1.The most serious limitation is the incompatability of the NC license with other free content projects. You cannot mix content that uses an acceptable free content license with a CC license containing the NC restriction. This means that you will not be able to capitalise on building economies of scale by benefiting from the exponetial growth of free content from other open projects like Wikipedia. For example, if your project uses a NC restriction – you will not be able to include any of the images, sound files or video files of the Wikicommons project which now has more the 600 000 free content resources because the NC license is NOT compatable with the GNU Free Documentation License used by the Wikicommons project.
2.You may be restricting useful services that would aid the distribution of free content to people who need it most. For example, the NC restriction would not legally permit local community institutions to package print versions of an online OER for resale on a cost recovery basis for the printing and repackaging. The NC restriction would seriously limit the scaleability of distribution channels that cannot be replicated or afforded by public education institutions.
3.Realistically, it is highly unlikely that corporates will be able to make substantial profits from OERs, simply because the original version of the OER will always be open. Why would a “consumer” pay large sums of money for a commercial version of open content, when they can get the orginal version for free? Remember that large scale distribution is no longer the exclusive domain of large corporations — it can be done by anyone with an Internet connection or a DVD burner.

In the event that creators of open education resources are concerned with the very low risk associated with commercial activites in the realm of free content, there is a more effective way to protect the freedoms of the resource – namely to use the “share-alike” protection. Share-alike means share-alike, namely that any published revisions and derivitive works must always be released with a share-alike protection thus ensuring the future freedom of the resource. This is a far more effective way of promoting the freedom of a resource, because it encourages community participation because all contributions will remain within the commons.

The NC restriction results in a non-free license and in my view, should be avoided.

And yes, while less people are likely to use CC at this juncture in time than full copyright -e.g. Flickr-, the tide is changing. More articles like this where CC are actively debated need to occur to raise the profile of CC, as well as test the legal boundaries.

And start using the CC icon and copy-left symbol on everything out there! The power of the icon-symbol is what is going to make this thing work. I say we start lobying the keyboard standard people to make CC one of the symbols like copyright or trademark! – Still figuring out how to do this though?

The greatest beneficiaries of open access will be students and learners – people who want to read or use the materials in order to learn, not people who want to republish them for their own personal gain.

It is true that most corporate – and even some non-profit – entities won’t use material stamped with a ‘NC’ clause. Big deal. Who cares?

No student working on their own, blogging content, creating mash-ups, or sharing files would ever confuse themselves with a commercial entity, and no such student would be deterred by the ‘NC’ clause.

We don’t need to know exactly where the fine line is. The important thing is to get out of this producer-consumer mentality. CC-NC is about sharing in a non-commercial community, a network of learners, not content producers.

This, in my view, is the big danger of relying on publishers and industry in general for any aspect of open access and open learning – the danger of becoming bogged down in conditions and arguments that revolve around their needs and interests, the danger of turning what should be free into something that is (in perhaps everything but name) a commercial enterprise.