Creative Commons

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

In this 51 minute recording, we'll hear from CNI's Cliff Lynch.  Listen in has he shares some thoughts on cyberinfrastructure, patents, and much more..


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 23 minute recording, we'll hear Peter Kaufman and Mark Phillipson, both from the Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning.  Listen in as they cover a range of topics related to the use of digital video in education. 

See also:
http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall/abstracts/PB-teaching-kaufman.html
http://www.columbia.edu/ccnmtl/projects/vital/index.html


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivi

In this 15 minute recording, we'll hear from Rice University's Geneva Henry about a range of topics including open source, connexions, intellectual property and more.

See also:
http://delange.rice.edu/conferenceVI.cfm
http://cnx.org/


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 9 minute recording, Gene Spencer sits down with COSL's Shelley Henson to learn more about the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. 

flickr is a wildly photography website recently purchased by yahoo. It allows users of free accounts to upload 20 megabytes / month of images and users of paid accounts to upload 2 gigabytes / month. Once the photos are uploaded, the fun begins, users can comment on, add notes to and bookmark each other's images as well as join social groups to provide feedback and comradery. With thousands of users and millions of images, flickr is certainly picking up pace.

One of the best features of flickr is the ability to set a default licence for images, allowing users to completely restrict usage, or allow usage under one of the Creative Commons open content licences. Rather than give their own interpretation of the licences, flickr refers users to the very good licence choice wizard on the Creative Commons website, and gives users the option (shown) ot either set a default licence for new images or batch update existing images.

UKOLN has a very interesting document making that case for releasing some specific documents under a Creative Commons licence. The documents in this case are those generated by the JISC-funded QA Focus project.

They think that using the creative commons they can maximise take-up of project deliverables by allowing reuse and customisation.

New guidelines on information security and safety were today issued to all colleges and universities in the UK. The guidelines, issued by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association), are aimed at helping educational institutions reap the benefits of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) while protecting themselves, their staff and students from online threats.

The document, produced by UCISA, covers such topics as outsourcing, planning and personnel, as well as more immediate matters such as cryptography, teleworking and user management.

Unfortunately the documents are released under a very-nearly but not quite Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.

Ariadne 45 is out, with articles such as "Web 2.0: Building the New Library," "Putting the Library into the Institution: Using JSR 168 and WSRP to Enable Search within Portal Frameworks" and "Repositories, Copyright and Creative Commons for Scholarly Communication"

A growing consensus tells us that content (which turns out to be pretty much everything we create) should be available for reuse under open content licences such as the Creative Commons. Another consensus tells us that we need to count every re-use or re-purposing because sooner or later someone will come along to measure the quality of our work, and will measure it quantitatively rather than qualitatively, because qualitative evaluation is hard. Those employed at the coal-face of education will be familiar with league tables of various kinds, but other forms of also exist.

What happens then, when these two principles conflict? What happens when someone takes what I am doing and re-proposes my blog as a blog within their own site for their own audience? (See here, here or here for examples). Short blog entries (those with no "read more" link) are carried in their entirety on these sites, giving readers no cause to go to either the educause or OSS Watch sites, so I have no idea (and no way of tracking) who is reading my entries from these sites.

In this 20 minute interview, we'll hear from Brian Lamb, Project Coordinator at the University of British Columbia as he shares thoughts on blogs, podcasts, wikis, aggRSSive, and the potential for Creative Commons in academia.   Brian's weblog is available at Abject Learning.

The Internet fad of the moment (or was it yesterday's fad of the moment?) is flickr, a photo website and community which encourages creative commons licensing and image reuse. One of those reuses is Spell with flickr, a neat tool in which the text of your choice is spelt out in random letters taken from flickr.

This raises significant issues, however, because a large number of companies (and open source projects) are in the business of sell fonts, which they claim copyright over. If copyright does exist on fonts, does it still exist on the font once it has been used in signage, placed in a public place, photographed, and posted to flickr? What if the images were then taken and repackaged as a font? If not, does this provide a mechanism for users to duplicate copyrighted fonts in an uncopyrighted manner?

This has been discussed by readers on boingboing, where the conclusion appears to be that fonts are not copyrightable in the USA, but programs that implement them are.

To complicate matters, in Germany there is a special law protecting copyright of fonts. To quote the comp.fonts FAQ: In Germany, where typeface design has always been a significant part of the cultural heritage, and where typefounding has remained an important business, there are more than one kind of copyright-like protections for typefaces. Certain long-standing industrial design protection laws have been used to protect typeface designs in litigation over royalties and plagiarisms. Further, there is a recent law, the so-called "Schriftzeichengesetz" enacted in 1981, that specifically protects typeface designs. New designs are registered, as is done with copyright in most countries. This law only protects new, original designs. It is available to non-German designers and firms. Therefore, some type firms and designers routinely copyright new designs in West Germany. This gives a degree of protection for products marketed in Germany. Since multinational corporations may find it cheaper to license a design for world-wide use rather than deal with a special case in one country, the German law does encourage licensing on a broader scale than would initially seem to be the case.

One of the key tests for schemes such as the Creative Commons is whether artists can move from the "incubator" sites such as ccMixter to become fully-fledged artists competing in the mainstream. Earlier in the year ccMixter artist Minus Kelvin was discovered and given a record deal and now two ccMixter artists have got together and spun out a record label. A very good start.