Licenses

There have been a number of comments on my recent post about license compatibility problems. I want to address two specific, related comments… ...

Preparing for my out-of-body presentation in Taiwan this week (I’m at home sick - grrr), I kept thinking about the OER space until I actually started visualizing it as a kind of outer space, with little OER bits floating around aimlessly. It was pretty fun to think about until I realized that the primoridal OER soup, the “OER Nebula” is actually being pulled in several directions by several different sources of gravity: ...

You may be somewhat surprised to hear that talk on the UNESCO IIEP list, set up for the discussion of open educational resources, has temporarily turned to the topic of open versus free versus libre again. :) Here is my contribution to the conversation, in which I quote and than “adapt” John Adams… ...

Derek Keats, who I greatly respect and admire, responded to my earlier post with this reply: ...

A few months ago I blogged about a project idea called Send2Wiki, that would let you (via a bookmarklet) send any page you’re viewing in your browser directly into a wiki for instant editing / remixing. Today I’m happy to announce that the first alpha of Send2Wiki is available! You can play with it over at http://send2wiki.com/. Send2Wiki includes preliminary support for license detection and preservation, automated translation (via Google Language Tools), PDF support, and chrome-stripping for specific sites (some OCWs and wikipedia at this point). ...

Here’s a draft of a chapter I am writing for an upcoming book on open education. It’s (supposedly) written from some time decades in the future, and is part autobiography and part history. I’d love any feedback you have… ...

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 on to comment: The trigger to the Copyright Office’s Orphan Works Remedy is whether a copyright owner can be found with a “reasonably diligent search.â€? That standard is just mush. The report outlines six factors to be considered in determining whether a search is “reasonably diligent.â€? The effect of this complexity is simply make-work for lawyers. Libraries and archives will be unfairly burdened. Users won’t be able to achieve any real security. ...

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. ...

1. It’s an empirically verifiable fact that the greater number of rights a license reserves, the more people are willing to adopt the license. At the extremes of the continuum, almost everyone takes an “all rights reserved” approach while almost no one takes a “no rights reserved whatsoever” approach. The middle cases can be quickly verified by checking Flickr or any of a number of other sites that show the aggregate behavior of users allowed to choose between CC-licenses. I have done a little writing about this previously. ...