Open Content and the Creative Commons: A revolution in educational publishing
Heather Ford, LINK Centre Associate
25 January, 2005
Copyright is the law that regulates the distribution and use of information. Copyright
consists of a bundle of rights that automatically arise whenever an author gives
expression to an idea (in the form of a literary work, sound recording, movie etc). This
bundle of rights includes the right to copy, adapt, publish and broadcast the work.
Copyright only lasts for a limited period of time (50 years in South Africa), after which
the work falls into the public domain.
Today I’m going to talk to you about why decisions about copyright are central to the
opportunities afforded to us by the internet – opportunities to both lower the costs of
producing and distributing knowledge and educational resources, as well as opportunities
to improve the quality of those resources.
First, a story to illustrate how important copyright management is to questions of access
to education and knowledge.
Richard Baranuik was an engineering professor at Rice University. Richard was a great
teacher but he felt as though his tools – the textbooks that he was using to teach his
students – were failing him. They weren't helping his students learn as much as they
should, and they didn't support his teaching style. Richard believed that traditional
textbooks tended to offer a great deal of irrelevant or redundant information and weren’t
able to cast any light on vital subjects.
Richard thought that traditional textbooks were too linear and that they didn’t reflect the
needs of different students. Richard wanted to write a textbook that could be broken up
into chunks and adapted to suit the needs of different learners. Even worse, by the time
they make it through writing, editing, school board reviews, publishing and finally into
students hands, textbooks — especially in the fast moving sciences — are often obsolete.
So Richard decided to build a new, better textbook. An enthusiastic internet scholar,
Richard was excited about the successes of the free and open source software movement
in developing more robust software by opening up the development and access of
products to a global audience. He believed that there were lessons to be learned in
applying the same concepts of distributed authorship to developing high-quality
textbooks.
And so, Richard started ‘Connexions’, an online, ‘open content’ project that gives
learners free access to educational materials that can be readily manipulated to suite her
individual learning style. The free software tools that run the online library also foster the
development, manipulation, and continuous refinement of educational material by diverse
communities of authors and teachers. This means that teachers from around the world can
access high quality learning materials that they can refine according to the particular
needs of their students.
But when Richard went to the legal department of his university to approve a copyright
policy for the project, he hit a major stumbling block. "We felt totally hamstrung by our
own legal department," says Baraniuk. "I mean, it's hard to come into the administration
and say, look at all this great stuff we want to give away — the source code, the ability to
publish and modify this content, the content itself."
Recalling the story in an article by Ashley Craddock, Baranuik said that, to the legal
team, "free" and "open" meant "unprotected." And unprotected was not something the
Rice University legal team was willing to countenance. The clash was perhaps,
inevitable. "It's interesting that education is the place where the problem of licensing
open, free materials became an issue," says Chris Kelty, an anthropologist who studies
the open source movement and is on staff at Connexions. "Educators traditionally build
on the shoulders of their peers. This project is all about trying to systematize, formalize
and facilitate something that already happens."
After weeks of frustration, Connexions heard about a set of open content licences called
‘Creative Commons’. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that has developed
a set of licences to mark work as free to copy and share under conditions set by the
copyright holder. Richard learned that using a Creative Commons license does not mean
that the copyright holder gives up their copyright, but rather that it offers some of their
rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions. These conditions are established by
the copyright holder who must make three important decisions about how their work will
be accessed by others:
1. Whether the work will be made available under non-commercial or commercial
terms;
2. Whether derivatives will be allowed to be made of the work or not; and finally
3. Whether derivative works must be made available under the same terms that they
were first used, or not.
Once the copyright holder has made their choice, the Creative Commons web engine
delivers the appropriate license expressed in three ways:
1. Commons Deed. A simple, plain-language summary of the license, complete with
the relevant icons.
2. Legal Code. The fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in
court.
3. Digital Code. A machine-readable translation of the license that helps search
engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use.
Excited about the potential of Creative Commons licences to both protect the authors and
copyright holders, as well as to offer concessions for users to edit and transform the
works, Richard selected the Creative Commons Attribution licence to grow the
Connexions repository.
Despite serious misgivings by many people in the legal field, the project had a very
positive response on licencing issues from the academic community. "It's been very easy
to get professors to agree to write course modules," says Baraniuk. "People really
understand that with these licenses they aren't giving up credit, and they are opening their
ideas up to what is potentially a huge audience."
Creative Commons licences have since been used by a host of educational providers
around the world. The University of the Western Cape’s project uses Creative Commons
to licence educational content as free to copy, edit and share for non-commercial
purposes, and the world-famous Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) has freed
up its entire curriculum to educators around the world using the licences. The
Shuttleworth Foundation is using the Creative Commons to licence its documentation and
training resources, while authors like Lawrence Lessig, Dan Gillmore and Cory
Doctorow have made a number of their titles freely available on the internet.
But Creative Commons is not the only organisation that makes open content licences
freely available to the public. Wikipedia.org, the largest encyclopaedia in the world, for
example, decided to use the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation Licence) to licence its
more than one million articles.
Like Creative Commons, the GFDL licence outlines and protects the ownership and reuse of content in the following way:
1. First, the content is protected by copyright.
2. Then, the copyright holder grants permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the
content according to a licencing agreement.
The GFDL is classified as a ‘copyleft’ licence for ‘free content’ because it ensures that
every person who receives a copy or derived version of a work, can use, modify, and also
redistribute both the work, and derived versions of the work. The licence stipulates that
any copy of the material, even if modified, carry the same license. Those copies may be
sold but, if produced in quantity, have to be made available in a format which facilitates
further editing.
The Shuttleworth Foundation is providing its TuxLab school projects with access to
wikipedia which is then updated on a daily basis. Educators at these schools are, in turn,
being encouraged to contribute towards the Wikipedia project in the hope that we can
develop high quality curricula that is freely available to all in a variety of local languages.
The Shuttleworth Foundation sees the provision of such high quality resources as a costeffective solution to the lack of up-to-date library resources in many South African
schools – especially in the rapidly-changing fields of science, mathematics and
engineering.
Other internet publishers have seen the lack of restrictions on public domain works as an
opportunity to provide public access to titles that are a feature of many school curricula.
The public domain is a body of work with no restrictions on copying, distribution and
editing. You may have noticed that many older works, such as those by Shakespeare, are
much cheaper than newer titles in bookstores. This is because the publisher often does
not have to pay any fees or royalties to copy and distribute the material (unless the
material has been translated or annotated, for example).
Project Gutenberg is an example of an online, volunteer-driven project that makes
strategic use of the lack of restrictions on public domain material in the United States.
Many of the more than 13,000 eBooks in their collection (available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/) include classics like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan,
Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost and Roget's Thesaurus, as well as many
dictionaries. An Australian version of Project Gutenberg (http://gutenberg.net.au/) aims
to digitise books by Australian nationals from as far back as the 1700s and make them
freely available to the public.
Another project called the ‘Internet Archive’ (www.archive.org) has the goal of
providing access to ‘all human knowledge’. According to Archive founder, Brewster
Kahle, for the first time in history we have the technological capability to provide global
access to all human knowledge. Kahle believes that stringent copyright rules are one of
the main stumbling blocks in achieving this goal. The Archive provides access to
thousands of public domain movies, television programmes and adverts, and provides
free hosting to anyone who wants to use Creative Commons to licence their work. One of
his current projects is to convince U.S. courts to allow the Archive to digitise works that
are out-of-print and therefore no longer available to the public. But in order to do this,
copyright legislation needs to be altered, a difficult task to say the least - especially in a
climate where the publishing industry is facing threats to traditional copyright from all
sides.
All of these projects require a different perspective and policy on copyright in order to be
successful. Where would wikipedia be today if it only allowed paying members to access
and alter articles? How many universities in developing countries would have benefited if
Rice University and MIT had to use traditional copyright and digital rights management
to licence their content? Who would have benefited if the Shuttleworth Foundation didn’t
use open content licences to develop educational curricula that is freely available to all?
The way that copyright is managed is therefore critical to questions of how to ensure
widespread access to educational resources. The educational sector is pioneering new
approaches to copyright licencing in the belief that copyright in its traditional form is not
the only way to encourage innovation and contribute to the growth of human knowledge.
The internet has heralded a new age and requires new solutions if we are to make the
most of this historic potential to extend education and opportunity to people around the
world.
Resources
For more about Creative Commons, go to http://creativecommons.org or the local South
African version at http://za.creativecommons.org
For definitions of open content and different licences, go to www.wikepedia.org
Activities in Africa
The Association for Progressive Communications (www.apc.org) is running an Osisafunded awareness-raising project around Creative Commons as an alternative to
traditional copyright in southern Africa.
The LINK Centre (http://link.wits.ac.za) at Wits University in Johannesburg is running an
IDRC-funded project to research the role of open content and copyright alternatives (such
as Creative Commons) in South Africa, as well as to conduct awareness-raising and
training of individuals and organisations in open content licences throughout Africa. The
LINK Centre is also the official host of Creative Commons in South Africa.
For more information on the projects, see http://za.creativecommons.org and
www.commons-sense.org, available from February, 2005.
Email Heather Ford at fordh@pdm.wits.ac.za or Chris Armstrong at
armstrongc@pdm.wits.ac.za.