An alternative to copyright to enhance sharing educational material

June 29th, 2006

One major problem with sharing educational content, is that the copyright laws oblige the user to contact the creator of a piece of work to ask permission for the use of it. Of course this is far from handy if we want to share educational material freely in a community. The idea of working with Creative Commons licensing, is that the creator publishes his/her work with an additional reference to a legal document that can be found on the Internet. This document states where it deviates from the default copyright law.

So for example, one could say that everybody is allowed to do anything with a piece of work as long as he/she credits the original creator of it. So in that case, the only thing that is left of the copyright, is the attribution to the maker. One can make use of the work in any way without further permissions (these were needed in case of full copyright). So it’s not the case that the license totally replaces the copyright protection. One can state in what sense one allows more freedom than the copyright law does.

There are a few variables that determine the final legal text. Those are: the jurisdiction of the text, the language it is stated in (apart from English, quite some translations are available), the demand to attribute the creator (is always set to true, so not a real variable actually), the permission to use the work in commercial contexts and the permission to change the work. So we could have a license written in French where the legal text is based on German laws and which allows people to use the work commercially as long as they don’t change it and mention the name of the creator.

At the site of the non-profit Creative Commons Organisation, you will find a simple form to create your custom license: http://creativecommons.org/license/. There you can find as well more information about what Creative Commons does and what not. I think that the availability of these kind of licenses is a very good step to take away the possible fear of sharing educational material. For more information on this issue, visit their website and an article posted at this site:  Hey dude where’s my data/.

Entry Filed under: Culture of Sharing