Open Content Licenses

Licenses that allow for the sharing of content.

Characteristics

"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

Notice how each of the first three Rs encompasses those that came before it. Reusing involves copying, displaying, performing, and making other uses of a work just as you found it. Reworking involves altering or transforming content, which one would only do if afterward they would be able to reuse the derivative work. Remixing involves creating a mashup of several works - some of which will be reworked as part of the remixing process - which one would only do if afterward they would be able to reuse the remix." (http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/355)

The Four Freedoms

Wikipedia’s Terry Foote summarized the freedoms at our 2005 Open Education Conference as:

• Freedom to copy

• Freedom to modify

• Freedom to redistribute

• Freedom to redistribute modified versions

The Four Freedoms as listed by Freedom Defined:

• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it

• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it

• the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression

• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

Examples

The two most important Open Content licenses are the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons licenses.

The IANG License offers a more radical approach.

There are many others:

1. Common Good Public License
2. Free Art License
3. Free Music Public License
4. Free Sheet Music License.

Discussion

Why Copyleft approaches are problematic for open content

From the Open Content blog:

"Copyleft is an idea borrowed directly from the world of free or open source software, requiring that derivative works be licensed using the exact same license as the original. This insures that when derivatives are created from a copylefted open content work, those children and grandchildren works remain open content, licensed using exactly the same license as the original.

However, while copyleft strictly requires that all future generations of derivative works be free and open, copyleft significantly hinders the remix activity. For example, conservative estimates say that there are approximately 40 million creative works that are currently licensed using a Creative Commons license. About half of these use the ShareAlike clause (Creative Commons’ copyleft clause). Of those creative works that use SA, about two thirds (~13 million) use By-NC-SA, while the other third (~7 million) uses By-SA. While statistics on GFDL adoption are harder to come by, because Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects use the GFDL we can safely estimate at least 7 million works are licensed using the GFDL (which contains its own copyleft clause). Since half of all CC licensed materials are licensed using a copyleft clause and all GFDL licensed materials are licensed using a copyleft clause, this means that over half of the world’s open content is copylefted. And while the CC and GFDL copyleft clauses guarantee that all derivative works will be “open,” they also guarantee that they can never be used in remixes with the majority of other copylefted works. You can’t remix a GFDL work with a By-NC-SA work when the licenses require that the child be licensed exactly as the parent. Each parent had one and only one license - which license would the derivative use? It’s just not possible to legally remix these materials; copyleft prevents this remixing.

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." (http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/355)

Why it is particularly problematic for Open Education

" As educators, we are always remixing materials for use in our classrooms both in the “real” world and online. Your mileage may vary, but over my last 15 years of teaching I would estimate that my remixing activities outnumber my reworking activities 10:1 or more. If other teachers are like me in this regard, then, copyleft is a huge problem for open education. Like the American football coach who tries to use his successful offensive and defensive strategies with a European football (or soccer) team, the open source advocate who brings the successful idea of copyleft into the world of open content will eventually be disappointed. The primary activity of the open source software developer is reworking; the primary activity of the open educator is remixing. Different activities require different supporting strategies to be successful.

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?" (http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/355)

Public Domain Dedication is not a viable alternative

"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 (like that offered by Creative Commons). First, dedicating a work to the public domain is a significantly more involved process than licensing a work. While Creative Commons is rightly famous for how easy their license selection technology and little green buttons make licensing your work with a CC license, the public domain dedication is much more complicated and includes a number of steps, including making a request for Creative Commons to send you an email regarding your intent to place a work in the public domain. This rigamarole is not the fault of Creative Commons; they have simplified as much as possible the process of putting a work in the public domain in the US.

But secondly, and more importantly, it may be impossible under the law in some jurisdictions to place a work in the public domain. For example, in the EU authors have certain rights that cannot be contracted or licensed away, making it impossible for an author to legally relinquish all rights to a work (or put it in the public domain). Creative Commons also recognizes this problem with the statement that their public domain dedication “may not be valid outside of the United States.” Hence, a public domain dedication is not an internationally viable mechanism for open content." (http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/355)

For all the reasons explained above, the author concludes that an Open Education License is needed.

More Information

See our entry introducing Peer Property.

Also: Free Music Philosophy

Key Books to Read

1. Liang, Lawrence (2004), Guide to Open Content Licenses. Rotterdam:

Piet Zwart Institute. Available at http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/opencontentpdf.

1. Liang, Lawrence (2004). Copyright, Cultural Production and Open

Content Licensing. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute. Available at http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/liangessay/view