Creative Commons Licensing
Online authors - which is anyone who works online - are concerned about how to protect and how to share the products of their work. On one hand, writing a blog (or posting one's print-work on a blog) or working on a wiki gets the work Out There. On the other hand, digital reproduction makes it easy to grab, sample, adapt, and alter the work. And on the third hand, IP creators are concerned about how to handle the collaborative efforts: mashups, adaptations, embedding images and videos and music in a page, or creating the collective document that is a wiki.IP = intellectual property, sometimes called "original" work. Poem, novel, musical score, scholarly article or book, photo, drawing, software application are all IP. So are notes on a classroom blackboard, a chalk drawing on a building wall, and a shopping list. When published to the web, a work is automatically copyrighted, just as it is in any other form of publication. Unless the creator allows rights, work's use is governed by copyright laws (all rights reserved) unless the creator explicitly changes those rights. Issues surrounding IP are complex and deserve a page on this wiki.
Things have changed. Getting work published no longer means simply "putting a work out to be read." Work on the Internet isn't just read, it's commented on, shared further, tagged, linked, incorporated, mashed up, adapted, reworked, republished, collaged ... Issues surround these uses include where the boundaries are, what makes for fair use on the Internet, when a work ceases to be original, when a work becomes original by being reworked... and how to carry IP rights from one iteration to the next.
The common sense of the matter is that print-based copyright isn't up to the features and speed of the new medium, so we change copyright to suit. The idea is to make it possible for IP creators to specify what rights they want to protect and what they will permit.
[Need a short history of copyright link.]
Here are some starting points
- Creative Commons has defined (and is refining) a way for IP creators to copyright their work, specifying the range and limits of use of their online materials. For instance, work on this wiki is licensed as Attribution-Non-Commerical-Share Alike. Go to the Learn More... page and view the videos or read the comics explaining licensing and the process.
- Wikipedia on Creative Commons
- Wikipedia on Copyleft For educational creations, ok, but it's different for art. Maybe.
- Start searching: Who owns Barbie? Who owns the culture's common icons? Are they open to ownership?
- Search at CreativeCommons: http://search.creativecommons.org/
New Methods of Production and Distibution
- Gamer Theory, Wark. Written with persistent feedback from readers http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ Shortens the peer review cycle.
- http://en.wikibooks.org/. Lists contributors: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Contributors
- Diffusion Bookleteer http://diffusion.org.uk/ Diffusion with http://proboscis.org.uk. Digital copy to printed booklet, to be annotated and revised. http://bookleteer.com/
- print on demand: http://www.lulu.com/. Amazon.
- http://www.140characters.com/: Print, iPhone app, blog, and face to face conferences
Three Frees
Net people and sharers define two three aspects of free- free as in beer: free content or code
- free as in speech: speak. but the speaker owns the words
- free as in puppy - Free for the taking, but you have to take care of it.
Free content
Free as in beer.- http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/ Lessig offers his book for free on the net. It also sells in print.
- http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition Rhetoric and Composition. Wikibooks. Collective authors/
- http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/ a distance education text from Athabasca University, Canada. Gains the authors and their institutions presence, visibility, and spreads their ideas more quickly and broadly than print can. Why buy a paper copy of the competition when this one is available as a download?
- OU Makes Learning Materials Available Online
- http://www.webstyleguide.com/ Web Style Guide, Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton. Available in both print and online. The paper version still sells.
- anything on YouTube (Not anymore.)
- flickr Many images on Flickr and Picassa are free to use for non-commercial purposes. Have a look.
- jamendo A site for music that is generally under the Creative Commons license.
Trends
There seems to be something to be gained by providers in making content sharable.- Online newspapers, mags, blogs make content sharable with Twitter, FB, Delicious, Pinboard buttons. The Daybook
- Twitter makes linking to content (pages, images) not only possible but pushes for the value in doing so.
- We're seeing a rapid growth of smartphones with cameras, and sites to share images.
- We're seeing use of sharable content being incorporated in education and for marketing. Both tend to naturalize the behaviors.
- Popular applications and apps make content repurpose-able: Instapaper, Reader button, and Macworld instructions
- RSS feeds allow users to subscribe to content as it appears on sites and to view it not in its original place of publication but on RSS readers. Makes access mobile, and content re-mixable.
- The OER movement tends to define its stance in opposition to walled garden LMS such as D2L and locked down ebooks readable on only one platform.
OER
OpenEducationalResources. MOOCs, course materials, textbooks ...Remember that you are not starting from scratch. Nobody ever creates something from nothing. That's why we call this section ‘repurpose' instead of ‘create'. We want to emphasize that you are working with materials, that you are not starting from scratch. Downes, Siemens, Cormier. Change2011 MOOC, How this course works
MOOCs
- Change2011
- GA Tech MOOC This MOOC seems to be riding on Change2011.
- Digital Storytelling MOOC
- UBC Wiki
- Morgan on PLEs Slides
Publications
- Writing Commons at USF.
- MIT Open Courseware: free educational material
- Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism. Book in print also available on line for free.
- Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Book in print and online for free.
Free New Media Content
[Need a list linked to digital poem and other works that can only be "read" online or on a computer screen: hypertexts, dataminers, ... ]Open Source
Free as in beer - and free as in speech.- Ubuntu: free operating system for almost any computer
- Open source software for Mac
- Open source software for Windows
- An incident in which a teacher simply couldn't believe open source was really open: Linux and the teacher [Needs references. This might be an urban myth.] [This is the truth that is the blog of the guy who it happened to article from The Register-NicholasOmann]
DRM
Digital rights management, watermarking, and other ways of tracking work. The main issues here surround the loss of value when content is protected by DRM. DRM tends to make the content accessible on only one platform, prevents copy and paste and other forms of adapting content for personal use. Because DRM requires a system-wide way of producing and distributing, DRM has acted as a gatekeeper, certifying authenticity and editorial approval. That is changing fast with the advent of Author for iBooks.MashUps and adaptations of works, tagging
- Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing?, Richard Hamilton, 1956.
- They're taking the hobbits to Isengard: Beekvold's site and the video on a stream
Gorillaz mashups
- Gorillaz - Mr Blue Sky
- Some source material: ELO, - Safety Dance, Feel Good, Inc, Dirty Harry.
- Gorillaz - Safety Dance.
Music Mashups
The general argument is that the mashup uses iconic source material to create a new work.
- DJ Danger Mouse, The Grey Album: "a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album made using the Beatles' White Album as the sole source material. "
Data Mashups
- http://beta.twittervision.com/ Twittervision
- http://www.wefeelfine.org/ We feel fine
- Profile pages on MySpace and Facebook. Who owns / controls the images and captions?
- del.icio.us: tagging as value added. Presumably, well tagged pages add value to the page for readers looking for information. Who owns this collection of links and these tags? Anyone can use them to their own profit. What rights are shared when tags are shared?
The Commons
- ''The Future of Ideas'' broken as of 2 2010
- http://www.nitle.org/rsrc_issues_lessig.php summary and review of The Future of Ideas, explaining the commons.
- http://kairosnews.org/node/view/3766
- Lamb's CC Workshop on a wiki, of course.
Questions for discussion concerning IP
- [Broken as of Mar 2012: The move to remove the NC clause: [[http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/039306.php Brian Lamb].
- What are we apprehensive about? Stealing? Sharing? Loss of control?
- To what extent is online publication and online work considered less-than-print, secondary-to-print, not-really-publication when compared to print publication and work?
- Where are the social boundaries of use? Many of you incorporate copyright protected work and other IP in your blogs. What's legitimate use by others? What's not?
- What alternatives might we develop for content producers? Tip jars, donationware, shareware are possible and popular among application developers. Ads and affiliate programs are used on blogs and other sites. Any others?
A Case
Who controls the use of and ownership of this collection of links, tags, and annotations? I posted them and now anyone can use them for their own devices, possibly making money or gaining fame or a grade from them. I gain value from them because they are useful to me. But I don't have to make them public. What motivation do I have to share them? What do I gain and what do I lose? If "they increase in value when they are shared," as some would argue, how does that work? What's value in that case?Someone should explore the gaps and overlaps between the legal and social practices of IP. That is, even when the legal matters are clear, people continue to share without permission. What's going on there?
