Horizonau2008:Creative Commons Licensing

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2008 Horizon.au Short List

2008 Horizon.au Short List pdf.gif

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

Critical Challenges

Key Trends

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

As new forms of publication and scholarship begin to take hold, the academic world is examining standard forms of licensing and rights management and finding them lacking. While current copyright and intellectual property laws focus on restricting use of materials, authors are beginning to explore new models that center on enabling use while still protecting the academic value of a publication. Some rights are still reserved, but some are proactively licensed at publication time to encourage re-use. These approaches make it clear which rights are licensed for various uses, removing the barrier of copyright and smoothing the way for others to access and use one’s work.

One such approach is that taken by Creative Commons, an organization that supplies easy-to-understand, “some rights reserved” licenses for creative work. Authors simply review the list of rights they can grant or restrict, make their choices, and receive a link to a written license that spells out how their work may be used. The licenses work within current copyright laws but clearly state how a work may be used. Copyleft is another alternative approach; often used in open source software development, copyleft describes how work can be used and also governs how derivative works are to be licensed as well. Models like these are beginning to gain acceptance among artists, photographers, and musicians; a few scholarly papers have also been released under alternative licenses. The NMC, for example, releases all its reports and papers under Creative Commons licenses.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

  • Flexible licensing removes the burden of rights management from finding, using, customizing, or creating derivative learning resources and related materials.
  • The costs of open-licensed content are very low compared to the content typically available from traditional publishers, and it comes with far fewer restrictions on use.
  • Sharing, collaboration, and scholarly interdependence are encouraged by open licensing models; the practice models a shift for students from being consumers of content created by others to becoming contributors in their own right.

Examples

  • Australian Creative Resources Online (ACRO) is a collection of Creative Commons-licensed media that may be used for any creative or educational purpose: http://www.acro.edu.au/
  • The AEShareNet Licensing System, hosted by TVET Australia, provides a searchable database of learning materials licensed under a variety of flexible terms: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/

For Further Reading

Creative Commons Case Studies
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Casestudies
Creative Commons is tracking projects around the world that use CC licensing models. View the list by country to see what is happening in your area.

Otago Polytechnic’s Intellectual Property Policy
http://www.wikieducator.org/Otago_Polytechnic/Intellectual_property
Otago Polytechnic has adopted an intellectual property (IP) policy that protects the content creator while allowing material to be shared and used for scholarship and research.



Sandbox Discussion (July-August 2008)

As new forms of publication and scholarship begin to take hold, the academic world is examining current forms of licensing and rights management and finding them lacking. New models for allowing use of materials — while protecting the academic value of publication — are increasingly in demand by both authors and audiences. Scholarly works may take a variety of forms other than text-and-image, requiring licenses that can accommodate unusual formats. As a very first step, institutions should be prepared with a set of Creative Commons-type licenses for content and encourage faculty, staff and students to use them and to favor materials licensed in a similar way.


Why is this topic relevant to teaching, learning or creative expression?

  • Offers opportunity to create a rich collection of learning resources, online texts, classroom materials that can be re-used, customized for local use
  • Reduces duplication of effort in content creation; decrease reliability on expensive and static text books
  • Encourages sharing, collaboration, scholarly interdependence [RSS]
  • Assists the whole Industry to better understand that rights associated with use, adoption, adaption etc of content are important and at the point of publication encourages appropriate assessment and assignment of rights.
  • Creates a critical mass of material that has educational value but must be made easy to find and save teachers/learners time.
  • Allows those with limited funding to access quality content (social justice)
  • Gives creators of content potential for much wider exposure
  • Contributes to collective building of knowledge
  • Frees people from constraints of trying to restrict access to their authored content
  • Allows us to put our resources into developing/ improving what already exists instead of reinventing the wheel
  • Collaboration across campus and across discipline will enrich the resource
  • Provides a simple mechanism to identify Intellectual Property rights for staff and student
  • Allows students to produce content that can contribute and in turn allows them and others to reuse this content in novel ways
  • Helps and models a shift for students from being consumers of things made by others to contributors and peers


  • list your thoughts here [LJ]

Please list links to local or international projects that are experimenting with or implementing this technology.

  • Otago Polytechnic adopts Creative Commons as institutional policy http://www.otagopolytechnic.ac.nz/index.php?id=281
    • "Taking an open view of teaching, learning and research, Otago Polytechnic reconsidered their stance on access to educational resources, then governed by traditional views of ownership and Intellectual Property. Key stakeholders were consulted in the review, which occurred over the past two years, providing feedback that the institution needed to be more open to support creative thinking and the application of theory to practice. This culminated in the announcement in March 2008 that Otago Polytechnic was releasing their training materials under open access terms on Wikieducator." http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Otago_Polytechnic
  • Australian Creative Resources Online "This site is for people looking for audio, video, and still images that can be used freely and legally for creating digital art, education, or just for fun." http://www.acro.edu.au/
  • RMIT Media program's 'Postindustrial Media Project' documents the delivery of a media program that is network and web centric. The project is wiki based and uses CC licensing to allow other educators to re-appropriate and utilise the material. See http://media.rmit.edu.au/projects/pim/


  • list your project link here [LJ]

Please provide links to any local or international reports, papers, or articles that either help define the topic, or that provide detailed information about it.

  • list your resource link here [LJ]


Please add any other information that may be helpful to the staff as they write up this topic.

  • AESharenet "The AEShareNet licensing system is a collaborative system designed to streamline the licensing of intellectual property so that Australian learning materials are developed, shared and adapted efficiently." http://www.aesharenet.com.au/
  • quote from "The Future of Education" "I followed up this issue in question time at the end by pointing out that in Australia the education sector is willing to share and create open repositories but we needed to show teachers etc how to populate their resources with open content rather than proprietory content. Creative Commons Australia is working with Australian Schools to produce guidelines to show teachers, students and resources developers on how to practically use the CC licences and a list of best CC resources to use and examples.

    The second problem is that teachers do not own the copyright in the materials they create for their classes or schools. The education department or administering body owns the copyright.So we need to buy in from these employers in the creation and sharing of open access content.

"http://icommons.org/articles/the-future-of-open-education

  • list your idea or information here [LJ]
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