...When I began recommending that people quit using OpenContent licenses [PS: which Wiley developed] and begin using Creative Commons licenses, I said it was one of the hardest things I had ever done. And it was.
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....
The four main types of activity enabled by open content can be summarized as “the four Rs”:
Reuse - Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
Rework - Alter or transform the work so that it better meets your needs
Remix - Combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works to better meet your needs
Redistribute - Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or the remixed work with others....
[W]hile copyleft strictly requires that all future generations of derivative works be free and open, copyleft significantly hinders the remix activity....
While promoting rework at the expense of remix - in other words, taking the copyleft approach - is fine for software, it is problematic for content and extremely problematic for education....
If we are serious about wanting the freedom to legally and frictionlessly remix educational materials, we have one of two choices: either ignore the OpenCourseWares, Wikipedia, and other copylefted open content of the world (i.e., work only with open content that isn’t copylefted), or forcibly constrain ourselves to one subset of the “open” content universe. Do you see the irony? ...
If the appropriate goal for a license is, as it appears, to make open content available without any restrictions, why not simply dedicate the works in question to the public domain? There are a number of problems with a public domain dedication....
The purpose of the new license is to create a way for people to license their works in such a way that:
applying the license is easy for authors and understanding the license is easy for users,
engaging in any of the four Rs of open content can occur in a completely frictionless manner,
the license imposes no restrictions on licensees, decreasing the chances of accidental discrimination against persons or groups, and
remixing is well supported, so that licensed content is legally remixable with any other content to which the remixer has rights, whether (c), CC, GFDL, or differently licensed, decreasing license incompatibility problems....
The draft license itself occurs at the end of the post. For more on Wiley’s argument that proper licensing is a better solution for open content than the public domain, see his next post (August 9).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/11/2007 08:27:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
