At the OCW Consortium meetings at the Open Education conference in September, I asked whether other OCWs had explicitly CC licensed their metadata. In talking to people then and since then, the general response is best characterized as hemming and hawing. Very folks appear to have considered this licensing status of their metadata. But this seems like a very clear issue to my very simple mind. I mean, what’s the point of creating open access materials if you’re going to hoard your metadata and make it hard for people to find the materials? (This same problem is what seems to have stymied the NSDL for a few years in the early 2000s.)
In thinking about this issue again today, it occurred to me that metadata are derivative works based on the original materials. What this means is that, for those OCW or OER sharing entities that don’t explicitly CC-license their metadata, the community could create metadata based on the materials themselves (to replace the privately-held metadata), which would obviously be a derivative work, and would therefore automatically invoke the Share-Alike clause so many OCW and OER providers use for their materials. And that’s how we get CC-licensed metadata.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, and open educational resource providers will do the right thing and save the community the extra work… We’d rather spend our time using the materials in our classrooms or communities than using it to *re*create their *existing* metadata. But the notion of metadata as derivative work seems like an interesting one worth exploring.
Let’s not start down the wrong path by talking about derivative works or licensing. Both assume that metadata are copyrightable. I’d start from the opposite assumption, that metadata are uncopyrightable facts.
Ah! David, I rarely disagree with you, and I hesitate to do so without having my references ready, but this is too important. To classify metadata as “derivative work” would be a huge mistake. That would make writing metadata of someone else’s work copyright infringement.
Metadata falls into the *fair use* category of “critical editions.” Unfortunately for those who back GNU-like openness, that places metadata into a BSD-license-type of space. You and I are free to create all the metadata we want, but so is company X, and they are free to charge for it.
This is apparent in companies who make DVD players that automatically skip offensive content. Even though there is an ISO standard for marking up temporal media (MPEG-7, which we presented two years ago at your open learning conference), these companies prefer to use their own proprietary metadata format.
Please, please, please, reconsider this stance. I fear some lawyer will stumble upon this post, knowing who you are, and use it a copyright dispute on this very topic.
-jb
Work that my colleagues and I have done on the Core Description Profile of MPEG-7 has been based on the assumption that information on films (a sort of metadata) constitutes a “critical edition” of sorts and is thus NOT a violation of copyright. This assumption has been guided by legal opinions from various sources but so far is untested in court. I strongly suggest that metadata falls into this category.
For example, if we make available a list of comments on the scenes in a movie, then there is a great deal of precedent that suggests this is just fine. On the other hand, it seems clear that if we transcribe a movie and make that available as a sort of metadata (i.e. describing exactly what is said in the movie), then we would be violating copyright. If we make available an alphabetized list of the words with pointers to where those words appear, however, then we would not be violating copyright.
Finally, I do not quite understand why anyone would want to put their stuff in the no-man’s land sort of limbo you seem to be describing. Essentially, why would someone create open courseware materials with accompanying metadata, making the materials openly available and then turn around and restrict “access to” and/or “reuse of” the metadata?