Copyleftrightleftright
Copyright is something that makes my head hurt quite badly - both in my general lacking of legal understanding of it, and, with things that I do understand, in my incomprehension at how it can actually work like that. (For example, according to Commons, a photograph of a Mickey Mouse figure is copyrighted, and therefore ineligible for use in OER.)
I very much enjoyed Larry Lessig’s talk at OLCON 2002. I have been lucky enough to see Lessig talk in the flesh - and I can honestly say I had tingles up and down my spine for a large portion of it. This ‘open/free’ world we live in is a passionate domain - the OER movement is an umbrella for enthusiasts of many interests and affiliations (and even calling it a “movement”, as Dan Atkins and John Seely Brown did in their report to Hewlett’s gathering in 2007, moulds, consolidates, and even transforms it somewhat). Lessig (and a few others) are beacons for raising awareness of how modern copyright stifles creativity and cuts off access for the majority of the world’s people. OER, open source, and other free-culture initiatives are providing a framework for doing something about it - as Lessig continually exhorts us to do.
However, in their article, Ahrash Bissell and James Boyle are quite right to point out the danger in the free culture movement’s response to copyright - which is to create a range of licences permitting various certain freedoms of use of content - many of which are completely incompatible with each other. “Licence proliferation” may indeed result in “scattered islands of incompatible and mutually incomprehensible content” and “a pedagogical Tower of Babel” (though there may indeed be other reasons for their lack of connectivity or interoperability). I have heard some people say we need another licence - just for educational use - but this clearly simply adds to the problem of licence proliferation. What we need is greater interoperability between licences, and for content to be made progressively more free, in order to enable the greatest possible use of resources, including in ways that their creators had never thought about. CC-Learn is a commendable operation in this regard - but I would advocate that this is a global learning project that goes beyond simply allowing a certain organisation to “do the thinking”. I deal with some of these issues as part of my everyday work in Wikiversity, and I have been privy to many intense debates in my time, but perhaps if I was involved in a wider and more systematic discussion around copyright, copyleft, and education, my head wouldn’t hurt so much…
April 25th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
[…] Images can cause problems on Wikiversity. For example, there was much activity recently by a group of students in a face to face group, who had been tasked with writing educational materials on “Design for the environment” as part of their coursework. They developed a lot of good resources - but, as I pointed out on the talk page, they also uploaded a large number of copyright violations. Some students were clearly aware of copyright issues, and used free content photos from Commons and Flickr (though sometimes these images were not free enough for Wikiversity); some students uploaded copyrighted work and illegally placed it under a free licence; and some others uploaded copyrighted work claiming that, since it is to be used in educational contexts, it falls under “fair use”. Whatever was done “wrongly” (with respect to Wikiversity’s free content principles) was not done out of malice, but simply a lack of awareness either of copyright itself, and how it works, or of Wikiversity’s position on copyright. And copyright - as I’ve said before, and as anyone in the free culture movement knows - is a mind-bogglingly complex arena. […]
May 4th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Hi Cormac
I think that your title copyleftrightleftright is enough to indicate your opinion and allow one to figure out what you want to say. Here is my comment. Of course I may be wrong or right. Anyhow, I admit that you are picturing the real life in a good way.
In his blog about copyright, Cormac discusses the advantages and disadvantages of copyright licensing leaving the debate opened because it is subject to different uses and circumstances. This technique in my opinion indicates uncertainity which is a new trend in modern literature. And it is really the characteristic of our nowadays