What do you think about while you stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about license compatibility issues. Specifically, I’ve been wondering how I can communicate to people the difficulty copyleft causes for would-be remixers. Until you get knee-deep in it, you can’t really understand the pain. And how many people ever really get knee-deep in it?
So I wondered… how can I bring that pain to the common man? And in addition to “bringing the pain,” how can I effectively educate them about licensing compatibility issues and instruct them in the art of creating legal remixes?
My first attempt at an answer is OER Remix :: The Game. As I once read in the award statement for the 1st Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest Best of Show award in 1997, OER Remix :: The Game “takes special pains to cause special pain.”
I hope you find an opportunity to play it with a class, in a workshop, or with someone you love this New Year. Keep in mind that the card designs and rule sets are “early alpha” at this point, so your feedback will definitely be used and will be sincerely appreciated.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Thousands of people complain that the term of copyright is too long. They point out that documents like the US Constitution make it plain that the term of copyright should be finite, and that it is absolutely critical that copyrighted educational content and other cultural artifacts eventually enter the public domain. This was recently demonstrated by the way people rallied around Lessig’s challenge of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act in the US.
However, it seems that – deep down – some people don’t really value the public domain. When given the option of placing works in the public domain early (ahead of when their copyright would expire), they will instead say:
Continue reading ‘Assymetry, Hypocrisy, and Public Domain’
Published on
July 27, 2007 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: copyleft.
Well, it appears I’m playing catch up again! For all my ranting about the problems with ShareAlike lately, I have missed Leigh’s eerily similar criticisms that predate me by several months. The writing is so similar, in fact, that I expect an online plagiarism detector would convict me hands down. Here’s Leigh’s commentary from May:
Continue reading ‘Slow on the Uptake’
Published on
July 26, 2007 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: copyleft.
Still working on my Introduction to Open Education class for the fall… In digging around for resources, I was pointed to the free content tutorial on Wikieductaor, which reads in part:
Free content, for the Wikieducator community, refers to the liberty to adapt, modify and use content without restrictions.
However, because the free content promoters are also strong promoters of copyleft licenses, there is a clear restriction placed on a person’s liberty to adapt and modify free content – they do not have the right to choose how to license the adapted or modified work.
Thinking more about copyleft generally (and not about this site in particular), it made me wonder – is this mindset a simple “the last thing a fish would ever notice is water” problem? The copyleft crowd are obviously super sharp and very thoughtful… How is it, then, that they can promote copyleft and simultaneously claim that free content has no restrictions placed on it? The CC-By-SA license chosen in this particular case also restricts use unless you’re willing to attribute the authors.
So, when a free content promoter says “you can use, reuse, and remix free content without any restrictions,” what they really mean is, “without any restrictions that we are ideologically opposed to.” They are, of course, perfectly within their rights to choose whatever license they like for their content (unless they’re making a derivative of a copyleft work), so this isn’t a criticism of their choice of license. We just want to be clear that the only case in which there are no restrictions placed on a person’s abilities to use, reuse, and remix is when a work has been placed in the public domain.
