There is finally a reasonable cc.edu proposal on the table (the proposal and some framing context are reprinted below), but no one has provided any feedback on it as of yet. Do people just not care? The lack of passionate debate, and especially the lack of response from persons of whom direct questions have been asked, has really taken me by surprise.
In the years I spent working on the Open Publication License, the biggest complaint we ever had was people not knowing how to represent which options they had invoked (none, A, or B) when stating that a work was OPL’ed. Wouter’s, Miller’s, and others’ points about confusion caused by a single forest-colored icon that represents many CC licenses is an excellent one. And in hindsight, it’s kind of hard to believe that CC has made the same mistake we did 4 years ago. As things stand, with three options in the infrastructure, they’ll need eight seperately colored icons just to cover the possible “licenses” which can be created using the
attribution, commercial use, and derivative work options, not to mention the public domain, founders’ and other projects…
So there seems to be a feeling that cc.edu should lead out in this particular area and just be a license unto itself, with a different colored icon. I am easily swayed that a seperate license is a good idea when I remember the pain caused by the OPL options. So here is the proposed structure of the cc.edu license:
– Require educational use as per the “education use clause”:http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-education/2003-June/000001.html drafted and discussed on this list,
– Require attribution as per the present option in the standard CC infrastructure (because academics expect citations and references),
– Disallow commercial use as per the present option in the standard CC infrastructure (because this is what educational licenses intuitively mean to most people), and
– Allow modifications of your work as long as others share alike as per the present option in the standard CC infrastructure (because this is the spirit of teaching and learning — passing on what you know to others who build upon and improve it).
I also propose that we request something in the neighborhood of Navy / Midnight Blue for our button, as I think it might appear more “respectable” than orange.