2007年10月14日 星期日

OpenEd: Week 7

QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently missing that would benefit the open education movement?
There are sixteen combinations of CC. Under eleven valid combinations, there are five licenses which have been phased out due to the lack of the attribution. Currently, there are six CC licenses are used. Besides these six licenses, I can not think one combination which is missing, but would be beneficial to open education movement.

QUESTIONS: As the CC and GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed with Wikipedia content?
OCW and Wikipedia use incompatible licensing models. Wikipedia uses the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL); however, OCW uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Because by-nc-sa and GFDL are not ocmpatible, it seems impossible to copy contents between articles on Wikipedia and articles on OCW. I may think about there one way to make remixed contents work out though I am not sure. One way is to have the original author relicense their contents to make them compatible or if you can get the permission from the author.

QUESTIONS: Some people claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these people mean, are they right, and why?
I am not sure about this. But I think it means if you choose the Creative Commons ShareAlike, then you can exempt from the limits of noncommerical purposes in the the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. That is, the Creative Commons ShareAlike allows users to remix, tweak, and build upon the original even for commercial reasons. I think they are partly right because based on the contents of "ShareAlike" , your new work should carry the same license as the original work. If your original work is allowed for commercial purposes, then your derivative work will be also viewed as being allowed for commercial purposes. But if your original work is not allowed for commercial purposes, then your derivative work will not be permitted for commercial purposes.

QUESTIONS: Is copyleft good for the open education movement? Why or why not?
Yes, I think copyleft is good for the open education movement. Unlike copyright, copyleft allows an author to keep some rights and give every person with permission to reproduce, adapt, or distribute the work. The licenses of open contents are an important part for the enhancement of open education. Reuse, rework, remix, and redistribution are four types of activities enabled by open contents. Copyleft which borrows the ideas from open source software, provides users the chances to modify, transform, recast the work without infringement of copyright. The concept of Copyleft corresponds to the four activities of open content. However, as Dr. Wiley indicated in one of his articles, there is one problem that open source software focuses on reworking while the open educator is concentrated on remixing. According estimation, there are over half of the open contents is copylefted. Works with copyleft are asked to keep the same license as the original. Remixing works from different copylefts is not legal. This will be a problem that copyleft brings to remix. It impedes the remix activity. Hence, I might say that although copyleft is good and plays an important role in open education, it also bring some obstruction that we need to overcome in the future.

2 則留言:

opencontent 提到...

With regard to your answer to the last question, "copyleft" here means something very specific - it means requiring people to relicense derivatives with *exactly* the same licenses. With that definition, do you think copyleft is good for open education?

Lucinda 提到...

Under this consideration that copyleft requires people to re-license derivatives, I don't think this kind of limitation is good for the movement of open education. It will bring authors more inconveniences if they need to re-licnese some contents again.