Creative Commons

Much discussion on the internet concerning the AP's new Pay By The Word policy. Gary Stager had this comment on Will Richardson's blog:

Why shouldn’t journalists and publishers get paid for their work?

Here’s a suggestion for edubloggers who believe that all intellectual property should be free - let’s stop paying teachers.

They just deliver content that is freely available elsewhere, right? Why is hard earned public money being given to teachers? They’re so 1.0!

C’mon teachers, get on board and do your job for free! Conferences can pay keynote speakers with links, rather than that tired old money.

Hello, Gary,

I know (or at least I think I know :) ) that you are playing devil's advocate here, but your comment is off-base. No one is suggesting that journalists and publishers shouldn't be paid for their work. On the contrary: some journalists and some publishers do an excellent job, and deserve every penny they earn, and more. They provide a valuable service by contributing to -- and in some cases, helping to shape -- the public discourse.

Delivering content is a service. Providing analysis on content is a service. Providing context on content is a service. Providing a service deserves compensation. Teachers do more than provide a service; at their best, they help students develop a set of skills that allow them to interact critically with the ideas they encounter, and articulate their thoughts effectively. This transcends delivering "content that is freely available elsewhere." In many cases, teaching is situational: an explanation gets created on the spot to help illustrate a point in response to a specific interaction among learners. Teaching isn't canned (unless, of course, you buy a textbook and deliver that curriculum via Blackboard -- but I digress).

Hence, your suggestion that teachers stop getting paid is absurd. But from reading your writing in the past, I suspect you know that already. Call me crazy, but I suspect you are employing irony (or is it sarcasm) for rhetorical purposes.

RE your suggestion: "Conferences can pay keynote speakers with links, rather than that tired old money." -- this, however, is an excellent idea. Most organized conferences are rarely worth the price of admission, unless you find value in having a vendor sell you a packaged version of a technology that was interesting three to five years ago. Anything that moves us away from the traditional format of Ed Tech conferences can only be a Good Thing.

And while I'm at it, the AP Technology News RSS Feed had the following stories freely available for distribution via RSS:

The following AP story, the rights of which are completely and fully owned by AP, was particularly interesting: "SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A federal appeals court has made it more difficult for employers to snoop legally on e-mails and text messages their workers send from company accounts...." You can read the full article here, from the link on the AP's web site. The AP reporters have done excellent work in researching this article, and you should read the entire article on their site. The same article can be read on Newsday, an organization who likely pays a fee to aggregate, republish, and rebrand AP content. This fits Gary's definition of delivering "content that is freely available elsewhere."

Gary, and others: It's called Fair Use.

If Jimmy Wales says I'm wrong, then I probably am.

But...

On a recent blog post, Jimmy Wales (or someone posing as Jimmy Wales, because I always assumed Jimmy Wales had better things to do than spend time out here in the EdTech hinterlands. Besides, if I had known Jimmy was coming over, I would have cleaned up the joint :) ) commented on a post where I advocated for using the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 (NC-SA) license for open educational resources.

His comment:

What you really are after is copyleft, not noncommercial licenses. Noncommercial licenses block all business models, even those which are not based on taking things out of the commons.

If someone can find a way to make a living out of improving (and selling) freely licensed materials, and they contribute their improvements back to the commons, we are all made better off.

And I get that, and agree with that. The point isn't to block business/commerce, but to take steps to ensure that Open Educational Resources remain open, and freely available. I like two main things about the NC-SA license: 1, by default it prohibits use in a for-profit enterprise, and 2, it contains a clause saying that "(a)ny of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder."

So, as I see it, the NC-SA license means that a resource can be made freely available. If a company wants to use the material as part of a profit-making product, they can seek the permission of the person/organization who holds the license, thus allowing businesses based on open content to thrive. This would not restrict, in any form, the ability of businesses to use the material as part of internal training, a knowledgebase, etc. As Jimmy says, and I agree with, when companies "find a way to make a living out of improving (and selling) freely licensed materials, and they contribute their improvements back to the commons, we are all made better off."

The key here is whether or not the company contributes back to the community. My concern with Open Educational Resources (OER) centers around the attitude of the publishing industry toward content and curriculum -- within the States, the major textbook companies have a long track record of viewing both as commodities, and, as described in this paper (pdf download), they have an effective loop consisting of lobbying to supprt specific educational policy while building curriculum that meets the newly legislated need. Given this backdrop, it is not farfetched to imagine a situation where a textbook publishing company used an OER to produce a text and a curriculum, and then used the threat of legal action to slow down/intimidate the competition. The merit of the lawsuit isn't the issue; rather, it is the time and money needed to defend against a suit. And we don't need to look very far to see an example of legal manipulations and lawsuits designed as part of an overall business strategy. Microsoft provides another example of this behavior.

Does copyleft provide adequate protection against this type of behavior? Is there another license that does this more effectively? What is the best method of ensuring that OERs remain freely available?

From some comments I made on Tom Hoffman's blog, in response to the Capetown Declaration -- Stephen Downes also has a great take on this.

As I see it, the thing to be avoided is:

A person or a community creates a resource that is freely available, and can be easily moved from one site to another. Some other entity comes along, uses that resource as a base for their work, distributes that resource, charges money for access to that resource, yet does not the new source material freely available.

That entity has effectively taken something that was freely available and commodified it into something that is no longer freely available.

In general terms, the point of an OER is to create a tool that is freely available. As that tool is improved, the improved version will also remain freely available.

From reading the Capetown Declaration, it is not difficult to imagine a situation where the major publishers co-opt chunks of allegedly "open content" and unleash their "experts" on it, and then generate reams of marketing material describing how they are embracing the democratization of knowledge. And, of course, this "new" work built on top of OERs would not be freely available.

It's pretty obvious that the barriers to more widespread adoption of OERs are financial, and not technical. Creating, sharing, and republishing content is easy. Any chump with a few hours of spare time can cobble something together. And textbook publishers are very nervous, as they should be. Given that the CC Non-Commercial Share-Alike License exists, and has a mechanism to prevent removing OERs from the realm of free access, why not use it?

The only answer that readily springs to mind is that it doesn't play well with business plans that are predicated on selling content. The thing I love about the non-commercial license is that it aligns perfectly with a business plan predicated on selling services that add value to content. In other words, you actually need to *know something* about what you sell.