Preparing for my fall course “Introduction to Open Education” (more about that coming soon in another post), I’ve been thinking hard about licensing and the “pro-freedom” camp. Wikeducator and FreedomDefined.org have several interesting pieces, including WikiEducator’s Free Content Defined and FreedomDefined.org’s The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License. I found myself in complete agreement with statements such as, “Sadly, much of the world’s knowledge is locked behind copyright and consequently access to this knowledge is restricted, especially for the majority of citizens in the developing world… The definition of Free Cultural works is based on the premise that the easier it is to re-use and derive works, the richer our cultures become.” But then I was particularly struck by the section on “Permissible Restrictions” from the Wikieducator tutorial…
CC0
Whether or not it was a response to my Open Education License draft is unimportant – Creative Commons has announced CC0 – the new CC license aimed at the public domain. CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in … Read more