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’
Stephen Downes takes a look at my recent piece regarding CC license selection behavior and says “the data don’t support [Wiley's] hypothesis” that the proportion of creators choosing the license is directly proportional to the rights reserved in the license.” Toward the end of my paper I claim that:
While WiSH holds up when licenses are aggregated according to the number of conditions comprising them, there appears to be very little support for WiSH at the grain size of individual licenses.
The data actually support the hypothesis quite well when licenses and selection behavior are looked at in the aggregate. In fact, the prediction and the behavior match perfectly. It is only at a more fine grained level when the predictions fail to match user behavior.
So, the big question is, what is the value of the proposed prediction mechanism (WiSH)? I’m not sure I know. But I’m not ready to throw it out yet because it only works at certain levels of aggregation. Thoughts?
UPDATE: Here’s Stephen’s comment which was made during the blog’s transition to its new home.
I’ve put up a new paper draft exploring the patterns in CC license selection behavior by users on Flickr. You can access it here:
Understanding the CC License Selection Behavior of Flickr Users
I’d love to hear what you think. I mean to clean it up for “formal publication” after I get your feedback…
At the request of list members, I am republishing part of the exchange on IT Forum between myself and Larry Lipsitz, and absolutely great guy who publishes Educational Technology Magazine. I’ll leave it to you to guess which voice I am. 
Continue reading ‘IT Forum Debate on Open Education and Publishing’
Back in August of 2003 I proposed that rather than create a new education license, we rebrand the By-NC-SA license as the cc.edu. The idea had lots of traction on the list – Stephen even agreed eventually 
– as did many others (see August – December 2003 posts). However, because of some push back from CC about rebranding as a strategy, the discussion moved another direction and to the frustration of many eventually fizzled out.
The rebranding strategy has become increasingly common for CC (c .f. the new wiki license beta), and rebranding is now an option for us. I therefore propose we rebrand the By-NC-SA as the Creative Commons Education License, and create a special commons deed for anyone using the license (i.e., add some contextual language to the human readable part of the license – e.g., the way the new wiki license beta has been handled).
Thoughts? Please send them to the listserv at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-education.
