OCW and Legislative Funding

I am extremely pleased to announce that the Utah Legislature has provided $200,000 to Utah State University for OpenCourseWare-related activities in the 2007-2008 budget year. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first state or federal funding to be set aside anywhere in the US for opencourseware-like initiatives, and only the second governmental … Read more

Must Be in an NC Mood

Know how you get in one of those moods where everything reminds you of the same thing? I was reading Lessig’s commentary today on the Copyright Office’s recent report on orphan works. In the report, “a work is deemed an ‘orphan’ if you can’t discover the copyright owner after a ‘reasonably diligent search.’” Larry goes … Read more

Noncommercial, Transaction Costs, and Sustainability

I recently received an email from Hal Abelson (you never know who’s reading your blog, I guess) in response to my post about MIT and CC’s differing interpretations of the NC clause. He reiterated that the Proposed Best Practice Guidelines To Clarify The Meaning Of “Noncommercialâ€? are only a draft and do not represent CC’s interpretation of the NC clause, and assured me that MIT and CC do not take different stances on the interpretation. Hal can speak from a position of authority since he is both the Founding Director of Creative Commons and a member of the MIT faculty and the MIT OCW advisory board.

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