But they couldn’t let non-registered-students see the video because it contained several pieces of media that would involve rather blatant copyright violations if distributed outside the context of the course.

It struck me how much effort and energy was being expended to protect disclosure of these violations, and how relatively easy it would have been to just avoid potential copyright violations in the first place by using Creative Commons and/or Public Domain media instead of commercial.

It then got me wondering – how much of the content generated by institutions is simply not sharable – not as a result of philosophical, technical nor design constraints, but because there wasn’t thought put into the implications of integrating copyrighted materials into this content?

I don’t publish things online for fame, nor fortune. I started doing this primarily as an outboard, searchable brain. Over time, the network effects kicked in, and I’ve kept doing it for the additional reasons of sharing thoughts, experiences, and information with the rest of the class. The conversations that take place across the various bits of the social web have become far more important to me than simply publishing content. In order to honour the spirit of the network, attribution for use of content is required – a simple hyperlink – which then teaches Google, Technorati, and the rest of The Machine about the semantic connection between pages (and people).

Why not invoke the Non Commercial clause, as many do? Technically, someone could just collect every blog post I’ve written, and every photo I’ve published to Flickr, and print a book for sale at every bookstore on the planet, without sending me a penny. Yeah. Someone’s going to do that. Hey, if there’s a market for it, go for it. As long as the Attribution clause is honoured, so the millions of people who buy that book know where the stuff came from. Maybe I’ll be able to do the book-signing-circuit and see the world.

The printing-everything-for-profit example is a bit extreme, and silly, but there is a real chance that someone might use a chunk of content, or a photo or two, in a commercial work. Without paying me a single penny. And I’m completely fine with that – as long as Attribution is honoured – because if nothing else, that means that someone is getting some value out of something I’ve done. There’s no harm in including it in a commercial work, and perhaps more importantly, there’s no reason for me to discriminate against projects that have commercial interests. Open content is open content, no matter who uses it, no matter how they use it.

Why not the Share Alike clause? Personally, I feel that’s a bit onerous – saying “I’ll share with you, as long as you adopt the exact philosophy toward sharing content that I do. Otherwise, forget it.” I think it’s a bit conceited to require anyone to adopt a particular license in order to use/reuse/remix/mashup my content.

Why not just release the content into the Public Domain? Well, as I understand it (thanks to clarification by David Wiley and friends), there are legal measures that prevent that. It’s not feasible to cleanly “release” content into the Public Domain – once you publish it, copyright is automatically yours, and various jurisdictions interpret that differently. Given that, the next best thing is the Creative Commons Attribution license – it maintains copyright, with very little friction.

What’s the result of adopting CC:By as my license? For my blog, I think it’s had no real effect. Most of the bits that get reused would have been covered under Fair Use, even if I had adopted a strict license. So, CC:By just makes it clear that I’m cool with people doing whatever they want with my blog posts.

The largest impact of CC:By has been on my photographs that have been published to Flickr. Everyone is free to download the original, full resolution versions of each image. And they’re free to use it for any purpose. That sounds pretty risky. Someone might just grab a bunch of photos and use them in a book, or a game, or a magazine! Yeah. That’s what people have done. So far, I’ve had dozens of photographs republished in dozens of websites, in one board game, in 2 magazines (one as the front cover). And one organization even insisted on paying me for a commercial license (which we arranged separately from the CC:By license so they didn’t have to provide attribution, and only after I repeatedly told them they could use the image for free as long as they provided a link).

Honestly, I’ve stopped keeping track of websites that use my photos – I used to keep a list, but that got too difficult to maintain. I periodically check Technorati and Google for links, and am surprised every now and then by a new website, article, blog post, whatever, using one of my photos. And that makes me smile.

So, while I can’t go to the local CostCo™ and pick up a copy of The Unabridged Works of D’Arcy Norman (handy for those bouts of insomnia), I know that there are people who are getting value out of something that I have created. I’m a firm believer in karma, and what better way generate more of the good stuff?

Which brings me back to the question “why share the content, if it’s not going to pay the bills?” I already have a job, and it pays the bills. To me, the value of contributing to the network far outweighs the cost of locking my content down. Adding any friction to the process of using content will mean one of two things will happen:

1. the content will be avoided, and something else will be used instead
2. the content will be used anyway, and the license will be ignored

Either way, the network loses. It costs me absolutely nothing to share my content. I’m already publishing blog posts and photographs primarily for documentation, and secondarily for feedback. Use and reuse are “free” from my perspective. I don’t have to do anything extra to let people use my stuff if they want. But, I’d have to work hard to lock it down.

Update: I almost forgot about some of the places where my photos have wound up as a result of CC:By. One was used in a kid’s book on patterns and shapes. Several have been used in travel guides (for Calgary, Banff, San Francisco, Honolulu, Vancouver, and a couple other places I’m forgetting off the top of my head).

The one reuse of my photos that I wasn’t comfortable with, but still allowed because of the license, was a straight reuse of the banner images I use for my blog. For some reason, that really struck me as an odd thing to do – the banner images all have a personal meaning for me, and seeing them stripped of that meaning and displayed just because they are purty pictures just felt wrong. C’est la vie, as they say in Sweden.

I think I’m definitely falling down on the academic rigour of my responses – I should be providing a much deeper response, rather than just barfing out some thoughts and questions. I’ll try to pick it up for week 3.

There is a very strong overlap between “Open Educational Resources” and “Learning Objects” – so, what is the difference? Why should anyone care about OER, when LO failed? LO had a strong focus on metadata, on machine-mediated interoperability. OER is focused more on the content and the license. There are no technical standards to define an OER, merely the fact that someone created an educational resource (however that is defined) and decided to release it under an open license (typically, CreativeCommons). Because interoperability is not the primary goal, the content creators are primarily solving their immediate needs for content, and secondarily offering the content for reuse. Learning Objects began and ended with metadata, and as a result never really got much traction.

In my personal experience, I share my content freely under a simple CreativeCommons Attribution license, not out of some sense of altruism, but because it doesn’t cost me anything to do so – either in time or resources. I create and publish content primarily for my own use, applying the CC By: license, and if someone else can benefit, then so be it. But sharing is not the primary goal of the activities of creating and publishing content. As a result, I’ve had photographs on magazine covers, published in books, used in board games, and in more websites and reports than I can track. All of that reuse was secondary to my initial purpose for creating and publishing the content – even if it has become more important than the original use. An argument could be made that I have lost potential revenue by releasing content for free use (even in a commercial context such as a book or magazine) but if I had locked the content down, that reuse would not have happened anyway. At the very least, sharing costs me nothing (either financially or in time) because the production of this content would have occurred even if the content was not shared. Further, I have had direct requests for separate commercial licensing of materials outside the bounds of CC By: (specifically for projects that couldn’t provide proper attribution) and have granted these licenses as needed – the CreativeCommons license is non-exclusive, providing much flexibility.

From an institutional perspective, I encourage open sharing of academic content wherever I can, for two reasons. First, it’s the right thing to do in order to disseminate the academic content as widely as possible. Second, from an economic point of view, in many cases the development of content has already been paid for by members of the general public – either through taxes which provide governmental financial support for the institution, or by contributions from other governmental sources. As a result, the content is indirectly paid for by the taxpayers, meaning they have a right to benefit from the process.

With this in mind, I think it is important to find processes of producing content whereby it is easier and more efficient to create “open” content than locked or proprietary content. The OpenContentDIY project with Jim is an example of this – using a hosted weblog/CMS application to produce content in a way that makes it easier to do it in the “Open” than not.

OERs and digital content in general is important because of the low cost of distribution – not free, but about as close as possible. There is also a strong environmental incentive – no forests are pulped to generate .PDF documents, and no oil is pumped to transport TCP/IP packets through the fiber optic backbone of the Internet. Also, by selecting an open content format such as HTML, XHTML, XML, or even just a well documented and available file format such as PDF, JPG, PNG or RTF, content is available for use on a wide variety of platforms, and portions of the content is available for reuse in other applications.

One trend that I find very impressive and promising is the growing acceptance of professors to have their students to “go public” (as John Willinsky advocates). I have talked with a professor at a high enrollment course at my university, who plans on having over 1000 undergraduate students collaborate to create open online resources to describe and discuss various topics. This is a strategy that would be impossible without digital content distribution, and would be difficult without open content licenses such as CreativeCommons. At the least, future cohorts of students will have a body of work to use as a starting point for their own projects. Ideally, future cohorts of students will be able to refine and extend the existing body of content, working to evolve the materials over time.

I am unconvinced in the need for repositories and referatories. As long as an OER has been produced using a suitable file format, and has a machine-readable license deed applied to it, tools such as the CreativeCommons Search utility should suffice. Individuals and organizations would be free to publish their content in any location visible to the open Web, and allow the existing infrastructure of Google, Yahoo, and the like to spider and index their resources for all to find and use. There is no need for creating walled gardens or silos of open educational content in the form of repositories or referatories.

I was surprised to see in the assay of OER projects, that they all seem to originate in “have” countries. The first world countries and institutions, releasing content as OER. That is likely to be expected, since these institutions will be more active in content production in general.

Question: Are third world countries seen purely as “consumers” of OER shared by benevolent first world nations?

I would hope to see significant OER production projects originating in third world nations, to foster culturally relevant materials and counter the “cultural imperialism” concerns.

One problem with a rise in available OER materials is the lack of “certification” in the content. There is no content review board, or process to verify accuracy and validity of the content. Conventional content distribution through printed books placed a burden on the publishers and editors, whose names appeared on the book. An OER could be created and published by an individual, without any accreditation or attribution.

Question: How best to determine accuracy and validity? Perhaps this is an opportunity for the repositories and referatories? Services like Merlot provide some of this functionality already, and there are opportunities for other localized services to review and “approve” available OER materials for use in various contexts.

I read David’s post on the proposed new Open Education License, and I’ve been struggling to understand why a new license is needed. Here’s the comment I left on David’s post:

David, I’ve been struggling to understand why a new license is warranted. How would this benefit either the original creator, or the content “repurposer” beyond what a plain vanilla Creative Commons Attribution license provides? That license allows derivative works, doesn’t require share-alike (although that can be added), and requires attribution. It also allows commercial use (of the original and/or derivative works) – or not, if desired.

Would it be as effective to just recommend a particular combination of CC bit flags?

From the post, David mentions that the new license is strongly inspired by CreativeCommons, using the same language and terminology, right down to the compatible XML description of the license:

<rdf :RDF xmlns=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#”
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”>
<license rdf:about=”http://opencontent.org/licenses/oel/1.0/”>
<permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#Reproduction” />
<permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#Distribution” />
<permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#DerivativeWorks” />
</license>
</rdf>

But, if the license can be described using CreativeCommons clauses, why not just promote a particular flavour of CC license for Open Education content? It could be essentially a branding/marketing effort, to promote the Creative Commons Attribution license:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This flavour of CC is pretty open – it explicitly allows copying, modification, redistribution, and distribution of modifications. It also (optionally) allows commercial use of the content and derivatives. All it requires is attribution. (more on this below)

By building on CreativeCommons directly, it would take advantage of localized versions of the licenses, and wouldn’t “fork” the mindshare of “open” licenses. Under the proposed license, a contributor has to decide if they want to use the more common Creative Commons series of licenses, or try out the new OEL.

David mentions that one goal of the new OEL license is to do away with the Attribution clause, because that may cause friction when content from one culture is used in another. A Sunni-created work might be frowned upon in a Shia-created derivation, if it was obvious through attribution that the work originated from a Sunni group. I don’t buy that argument – if there is that level of cultural intolerance, it will go beyond the name mentioned in the credits of a derivative work. The cultural origin of a work is inherent in the work, not just in the attribution byline.

I firmly believe that the requirement of Attribution is essential in sharing content. It brings along the concepts of trust, responsibility, reputation, and even simple credit. I don’t believe that many people will willingly expend resources (time, energy, money, social capital) in the construction of valuable educational content, only to cast if off in an essentially Public Domain license. They will want to know that they will at least be given credit for creating the work. And consumers/reusers of these works should be able to follow the provenance of the derivatives, to go back to original sources. Removing Attribution as a requirement breaks that chain.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that these licenses are not exclusive. If Attribution is impossible,  contact the creator of the work and arrange a separate license. This could involve a fee, or just an agreement. This is already possible under Creative Commons.

Which got me thinking about my experience with CC. I'm a firm believer in it. All of my stuff is licensed using a simple CC-Attribution license. Anyone is free to use any of my blog posts, any of my Flickr photos, however they wish. As long as they provide attribution to say that I created it. My photos don't even have a non-commercial clause, and as a result they've been included in a board game, books, travel guides, and (soon) the cover of a magazine. Sure, I'm not getting paid for any of that, but it's not like I'm losing out by contributing to the pool. Karma's a good thing, and if I want to use items in the CC pool, it's only fair that I contribute what I can.

I've tried mentioning Creative Commons in some workshops, and it seems like many (most?) people have a vague awareness of some strange subversive counter-culture movement called "Creative Commons" – but it doesn't seem to apply to them, and certainly not to their own creative works.

At which point I'm often left stumped, scratching my head and wondering what else I can do to show how CC applies to everyone. I model it, walking the walk every day. I show samples of works that couldn't have been created without CC. But then clients ask me how to ensure their content is locked down so nobody can even see it without their approval, never mind reusing and remixing.

People get confused about the difference between CC and Public Domain. They're quite different. Under CC, you retain "ownership" of the thing, and people are free to use it only as long as they abide by the clauses you select for the CC license. Under PD, everybody owns it, so nobody controls it. Subtle difference.

Also, people worry that if they release a work under CC, they won't be able to later sell it. Release it under a CC-NonCommercial license, and you're covered. You're free to later release your work however you like (commercially, or under a different license, as you deem fit).

Perhaps this is a side effect (intentional or otherwise) of the huge blitzes by the MPAA, RIAA, Disney, etc… in protecting copyright at all costs by suing 3-year-olds and grandmas. People are (rightly) scared of accidentally violating copyright and incurring the wrath of a well funded team of legal beagles.

I dunno. I strongly believe that CC is one of those things that has the power to change the nature of the game. It's not about gathering the most intellectual property, and staunchly protecting it through threats of litigation in the microscopic chance that you might make a buck off it. It's about freely sharing, contributing to the greater good, and all that jazz.

Regardless, I was a bit surprised to find this obvious homage to my blog design (well, to K2 and my tweaks), which closely mimics my blog’s current appearance – right down to recycling each and every one many of my blog banner images (which have been removed since I posted this).

My initial reaction was a quick “dude, that’s so not cool. use the design, but at least come up with your own banner images!” But, what’s being done is completely within the bounds of the CC license – attribution is being given, and it’s a non-commerical endeavor. So, I decided to let it slide. It’s understandable – the license I use allows it, and I even provide a full colophon listing the various off-the-shelf bits that twiddle to make up this blog.

So, while the CC license is a Very Good Thing™ for fostering reuse, it can also be a bit of a mixed blessing. It’s really weird – I’m totally fine with people doing pretty much whatever they want with the text, as long as they’re clear about not blatantly ripping me off. But seeing the images on some else’s blog just felt strange, and not in a good way.

What does that say about images vs. text? What does that say about my relationship with the banner images? They are all taken by myself, at various stages in life (one from the beach we got married on, one from the hospital room Evan was born in, etc…), at various locations in my travels (Hawaii from NMC2005, more photos of San Francisco than are warranted on a blog by a Calgarian, etc…). Each one means something special to me. To see them on someone else’s blog, where they are essentially stripped of that meaning and are being used simply because they’re pretty pictures, just doesn’t feel right.