Our good friend Cathy Casserly, former Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as just been elected to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. While there were already people on the CC board who cared about OER, the addition of Cathy means that the Board now has one of the most articulate OER champions around in their ranks. This is great news! Congrats to Cathy, CC, and anyone who cares about OER! ...
Creative Commons may not have set out to authoritatively define Noncommercial Use with their recent study, whose results were announced today, but I wonder how people will to interpret their findings… There appears to be broad agreement among survey respondents in some areas (as I highlight below). Unfortunately, the report also reveals that its respondents have very little understanding of copyright law. So what the report provides us is, in effect, a surprisingly coherent statement by a large group of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Hundreds of thousands of people agree that it’s ok to download mp3s, but a single judge disagrees with them (authoritatively) all the time. Unfortunately, the consensus in this report is not particularly instructive. Rather, the consensus may be misleading if you allow it to convince you that it means something. Perhaps a more productive use of the study’s grant money would have been supporting the argument of cases that would establish real precedent. ...
In his commentary on CC’s new report on the state of OER licensing, Stephen finds an opportunity to express his continuing support for the noncommercial clause: In the full report you find their recommendations, including machine readability of license terms, license standardization and license compatibility (which is once again essentially the recommendation that licensors drop the ’non-commercial’ clause (p. 16). This gets tiresome. Proponents can recommend this until they’re blue in the face. They can disguise this ongoing campaign under the heading of ‘research studies’. But the fact remains, especially outside purely capitalist economies, people have an aversion to commercial use…. ...
This should be the largest of all indicators that there is a huge problem with CC’s NC clause - Creative Commons is currently hosting a survey asking the community to help them understand what the term means. I mean, they’re only the authors of the license! :) Head on over and let your voice be heard.
Version 1.3 of the GFDL was released today. Section 11 contains directions for Relicensing, giving “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Sites” (why can’t Richard just call them wikis like everyone else?) like Wikipedia the option to change away from the GFDL and adopt CC-By-SA as their license. This is a glorious day for license incompatibility in the open content world, and one I had thought we might never see. Creative Commons also has coverage. Now the Wikipedia community just needs to choose/decide to relicense its work CC-By-SA. ...