You may have noticed the new symbols on my sidebar. That’s because I finally woke up and decided to start thinking about copyright issues for my blog and other content that I put on the Internet. I was moved by the NYSCATE conference to consider Creative Commons Licensing.
Creative Commons licenses allows creators to share content that they have created, while retaining some rights to the material. Steve Hargadon posted this great YouTube video on his K12opensource site by JustinG4000 which provides a great overview.
Having heard about it at the conference and seeing this video moved me to visit the Creative Commons site. The site makes it very easy to create a license for your content. Just click on the License Your Work on the upper right hand side of the homepage.
The up comes a page with a few questions and buttons to help you customize the license.
You can also fill out optional fields, making attribution to your site a function of copying and pasting as snippet of code. You can fill in whatever is relevant.
Click Select a license and you are delivered to page that allows you to select the appearance of the Creative Commons icon/link and gives you a snippet of code to past into the appropriate place on your site.
As you can see, the Creative Commons site makes it quick and easy to license your work.
Licensure choices
Creative Commons licenses starts with the premise that you allow others to copy your work as long as they attribute it to you (You can choose their Public Domain license if you do not care about attribution). The first choice presented is whether or not you allow commercial use of your work. I was almost certainly selecting No until Jim Klein responded to my Tweet asking about CC licensing. He cautioned that not allowing commercial use may prevent paid presenters from using your ideas (of course they could always ask permission). For my blog, I decided that I would allow commercial use on the remote chance that somebody would actually use my ideas. For my test prep materials, on the other hand, I barred commercial use.
The next choice is to decide whether or not you will allow others to modify your work. As outlined in the video above, you have three choices:
- Yes–allow others to change as they please.
- Yes–”Share alike” as long as they grant the same license to those who might use the derivation of your work.
- No–modifications are not allowed
I chose “Share Alike.” I feel that if anybody want to use my material and modify it, they should allow others to do the same.
Copyright, creative commons, and pedagogy
Now that students are becoming content creators on the Internet whether or not in association with schools, they need to consider copyright and its implications. The options presented with the Creative Commons license variations provides a great venue for discussing the implications of copyright in general.
Furthermore, considering the copyright of their own materials will make discussion of intellectual ownership in general more relevant to students than the standard plagiarism lectures. It becomes a real issue and will almost certainly give students a new perspective on the issues involved.
Creative Commons licensing makes sense, particularly for content creators on the Internet. Web 2.0 makes the issue of copyright very important to a widening number of people. Creative Commons also highlights issues in the realm of copyright that make it a great vehicle for discussion of intellectual property in schools.
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Tags: copyright, creative commons, pedagogy, web 2.0
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One thing that has always puzzled me about CC licensed blogs is whether or not the license applies to comments. Does the icon on the sidebar imply an agreement on my part to a CC license whenever I submit a comment? If there were no explicit license, would I retain IP rights over my comments, or is there an implicit transfer of copyright to you?
These things are usually very explicit in the terms of service of hosted services (usually to the detriment of contributors), but not so for self-hosted sites that usually have no terms of service at all.
I don’t actually mind what people want to do with my comments, since I don’t regard them as particularly valuable, but I’m just highlighting a point of principle.
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Matt–
Great comment and a great point.
Point taken in fact. Do you think the text below works? I hacked the theme’s app/templates/respond.php. I should learn to make a WordPress Plugin.
In addition I suppose I should add a Terms of Service page.
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Yes, I think it is good to be clear about the comments if you are going to put an explicit license on your blog.
Generally speaking, I think that open-content advocates have a slight tendency to over-license things. This is not meant as a criticism, since I include myself in this as well. We don’t want people to be constrained by the full force of copyright in using our works, but we often don’t think enough about the implications of the licenses that we choose to use.
Clearly, a big open source project needs to have an explicit license because it is part of the culture of trust that makes people feel that they will not be exploited. It is also important for things like music and video, since people are used to the idea that they will be sent a take-down notice if they use copyrighted content without authorization. However, short articles, such as those that might appear on a noticeboard at work or in a local newsletter, rarely come with an explicit license and I don’t really think they need one. It would obviously be bad if we all became license extremists and felt the need to slap explicit licenses on every sentence that we ever uttered.
Therefore, I remain undecided about whether it is useful to put an explicit license on a blog, but I have the feeling that most blogs are closer to the noticeboard articles than to the things that obviously need to be licensed. In most cases, it is very unlikely that anyone would want to repost the entire article, unless they were planning on passing it off as their own, which they are not entitled to do even if you have no explicit license. Most people wouldn’t want to do more than take a small quote from an article and link to you, which they could do under fair use in any case. It would be different if the article was a detailed and useful guide to something, e.g. running through how to setup SVN for Elgg, which someone might want to copy into the documentation, but you could issue licenses on a per-post basis to cover things like this rather than having a blanket license for the whole blog.
As for terms of service, it would be very unusual to have explicit terms for an individual self-hosted blog for the following reasons:
- Unless you are planning on hiring a lawyer, it would probably end up being a copy and paste job from another site, and the result of that is highly unlikely to be legally enforceable.
- It remains to be seen whether even highly sophisticated legalese terms are enforceable because they have never been tested in court.
- Most terms of service end up having to say something like you reserve the right to do anything you like, since you have to cover all manner of unforeseen circumstances, and this kind of defeats the purpose of anything more reasonable that you might want to write into the terms.
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Add the fact that what I write doesn’t adhere to the licenses that you have put up afaik. That is due to the fact I’m not american citizen and not posting it in the US. So the real use of such licenses are somewhat limited especially if one can’t afford to bring any legal cases to courts.
If I for example wants to use your work here on a commercial basis and not giving you any credit, you cannot do anything about it except opposing it. No legalities can prevent me from doing it since my actions are governed by another country’s juridical legislatures and their laws.
But it’s still important to think about licenses and copyright issues. Matt adresses some good points about it.
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For me, Creative Commons is more of an invitation than a prohibition. It sets out what I regard as acceptable use of my intellectual property. I adhere to the requests of others regarding licensing and can only hope that others do the same for me.
Any kind of licensing or copyright has similar enforcement difficulties unless you have a team of lawyers.
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That is fair enough. I can buy that argument for sure and I do sympathize with it as well. As a matter of fact I’ve used Creative Commons on other work of mine published elsewhere due to similar reason.
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Pingback from Sharing isn’t simple I | openedweb.com on June 6, 2010 at 1:08 pm
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Pingback from Rethinking CC Licensing | openedweb.com on June 24, 2010 at 1:16 pm
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Pingback from How about a summer of OER? | openedweb.com on July 11, 2010 at 12:58 pm
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Creative Commons License
Openedweb by Stephen J. O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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