Licenses

Stephen comments on Stian’s post: I don’t want to say “this is exactly what I meant,” but, this is exactly what I meant!. And it’s why I use the NC clause in Creative Commons. e-century reports: “One of the major reasons for this change was because some companies are trying to archive the articles published by us for pure commercial purpose – they will ’lock up’ all those articles on their websites and ask readers to pay to access them. This is obviously not right, and against our intention to keep all articles openly accessible to all readers, no matter where they are archived.” So, don’t tell me any more that this won’t happen. It does. ...

Some years ago I had the opportunity to address a class taught by my good friend Erik Duval. I spoke about blogging. One of his students, eager to show how technically competent he was, glibly pointed out that the “blogging software” that was just becoming popular (Movable Type as I recall) did not provide any new capabilities. He could already do everything MT did using emacs. Erik’s response ran along the lines of, “Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants. Everyone else will use MT to post their online writing assignments this semester, but you can do all of yours by hand.” After only a moment’s reflection, he realized he had won the battle but lost the war. ...

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 this response I sample from Stephen’s latest contribution to our conversation about the noncommercial clause of CC licenses, Open Content, Enclosure and Conversion, simply because a complete line-by-line response would take too long. I will rely on Stephen to call me out if I have sampled in a manner that misrepresents him, which I have made an honest effort not to do. I use Stephen’s subheadings throughout to break up my response and help the reader find the corresponding material in Stephen’s original post. ...

As reported on Ars Technica, a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision has given some legal teeth to open licenses: The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. ...

Since the discussion last week throughout the media generated so much interest (especially the story from Ben - who I respect a great deal - on Slashdot), some words on the FWK licensing model seem appropriate. ...

The Commonwealth of Learning recently released a chapter on open licenses for an upcoming book. However, there is one statement in the very first paragraph that leapt out at me. Some, disliking the business practices of commercial software suppliers and publishing houses, want to replace copyright with open licences. Some want to allow anyone to profit from the work of others without even telling them they are doing this. Despite the resistance to copyright by some open licence supporters, open licences are legal tools that use copyright law to achieve their objectives. It follows that for understanding open licences legal analysis is at least as important as ideological commitment. ...

I love Stephen Downes. Even though I can’t understand what he’s been saying to me for the last year, he still pushes me around mentally and makes me think and write. You simply have to love someone who does that for you. Commenting on Jennifer’s blog, Stephen asks: ...

This has been the primary question asked by people providing feedback on the OEL draft. Below I provide a four point response. ...

If you follow this blog with any regularity you’ll have seen this coming for several weeks now. When I began recommending that people quit using OpenContent licenses (developed in 98 and 99) and begin using the new Creative Commons licenses (in 2003), I said it was one of the hardest things I had ever done. And it was. (More background). Today I take the lid off the next most difficult thing I’ve done. As I describe below, I hate the idea of license proliferation. However, I feel that there are several convincing arguments that we need a new license at this point in the history of open content, and specifically in the history of open education. After providing the arguments and my thoughts below, you’ll find a draft of the first license issued by OpenContent in eight years - the Open Education License. ...