Open Content, Creative Commons, and E-Books

Week 4 Blog:

Open Content and Ethics

This week’s material covered much more than I anticipated within the subject of copyright law and the multitude of variations in law pertaining to the areas of open content, Creative Commons, and E-Books.  To me, the theme of the week was “sharing and collaboration - legally.”  Several quotes from each subject area drove home this theme.

Open Content:  “The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses” (Johnson, Adams, & Haywood, 2011, p. 22).

Creative Commons:   The vision statement listed by Creative Commons on their website states,  “Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity” (Creative Commons, 2015). 

E-Books:  The 2011 Horizons Report K-12 Edition, lists some of the benefits of E-Books to be, “Social tools extend the reader’s experience into the larger world, connecting readers with one another and enabling deeper collaborative exploration of the text” (Johnson, et al., 2011, p. 8)

Benefits and Ethical Concerns of Open Content, Creative Commons, and E-Books

Obvious collaborative benefits abound with the general concepts of open content, Creative Commons, and E-Books this week, including the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute resources in a sharable format.  The key difference in the types of resource distributions are the extent of the legal rights surrounding each resource and their accessibility to the general public.  E-Books are one of the means of accessibility for these materials using free content software such as Google, Flickr, and others. Copyright law is an extremely complex subject spurring professions such as copyright lawyers dedicated to preserving the rights of the creator for example.  However, society has evolved in response to the digital age to open up and share resources more freely.  The creation of new laws and licenses such as open content, free content, public domain, and many additional variations provide additional options for creators of today’s digital works.  Table 1 provides a brief, synthesized description of some of the terms of this week’s material.

Table 1

Definitions of Digital Resource Concepts

Term	Definition
Copyright (traditional)	Legal concept giving the author or creator of a work and legal control over the duplication and public performance of said work.
Public Domain	A range of creative works whose copyright has expired, or was never established; as well as ideas and facts which are ineligible for copyright.
Copyleft	Describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work.
Copyfree	A type of permissive license describing a practice that contrasts both copyright and copyleft using coyright law to remove restrictions on distributed copies and modified versions of a work imposed by both copyleft licensing and copyright.
Open Content	Material licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:  retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.
Free Content	Any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, or one which has no significant legal restriction on people’s freedom: ·        To use the content and benefit from using it ·        To study the content and apply what is learned ·        To make and distribute copies of the content ·        To change and improve the content and distribute these derivative works

Note:  Adapted from The NMC Horizon Report:  2011 K-12 Edition, Wikipedia – Free Content, and Creative Commons

There are many advantages to digital media resources, such as reduced cost, increased accessibility, collaborative opportunities, and the ability to update and change the materials in a customized fashion.  The materials can be easily updated and incorporate an interactive nature to the learning environment.  Unlike printed textbooks of the past, electronic resources are easily portable and accessible through a variety portals such as smartphones, e-book readers like Kindle, Ipads and other tablets, as well as most any desktop computer systems. 

Although there are obvious advantages to digital media resources as already described, there are some areas of concern.  Sharable materials can allow for the exchange of ideas, but one must be careful to ensure creativity continues to flow and we do not allow ourselves to become complacent by using the same materials each year without review and quality oversight.  The ability to tailor materials to our needs does not ensure instructor oversight.  Instructors must be vigilant in update and review of materials to ensure they are up to date.   In addition, ethically, users of shared materials must be cautious to provide the proper credit as per the copyright or license of the material being shared.

Licensing and Copyright

With all of the advantages of digital resources, many creators elect to share their work more freely than the traditional copyright rules of protection.  To be clear, anytime a document, photo, music work, or other digital creation is placed on the internet, copyright is automatically applied.  However, there exist several licensing options through Creative Commons that allow the creator the opportunity to choose a more accessible option for their creations on the Internet.  Table 2 depicts the options of the licenses as taken from the Creative Commons website.

Table 2

Creative Commons License and Tool Types

License Type/Tool Type	Description/Attributes
Attribution:  (CC BY)	·        Most accommodating of licenses offered that allows others to distribute, remix, and build upon original work, even commercially as long as credit given to original creation ·        Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials
Attribution-ShareAlike:  (CC BY-SA)	·        Lets others remix, and build upon original work even for commercial purposes as long as credit given and license of new creations are under identical terms ·        License used by Wikipedia
Attribution-NoDerivs:  (CC BY-ND)	·        License allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial as long as it is passed along unchanged and whole with credit to originator
Attribution-NonCommercial:  (CC BY-NC)	·        License lets others remix, and build upon your work non-commercially, with the new works also acknowledged to originator and be non-commercial; new derivatives do not have to be on the same terms
Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike:  (CC BY-NC-SA)	·        License lets others remix, and build upon original work non-commercially as long as credit given and license new creations under the identical terms
Attribution-NonCommercial  NoDerivs:  (CC BY-NC-ND)	·        License is the most restrictive of licenses and allows others to download works and share with others as long as credit given; the works cannot be changed in any way or used commercially
CC0 – “No Rights Reserved”	·        Enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright or database protected content to waiver those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law; the “no rights reserved” alternative license
Public Domain	·        Creative Commons provides tools in the “all rights granted” space; allows licensors to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain, and marks a work as being in the public domain on the web; enables authors and copyright owners who want to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain to do so and facilitate the labeling and discovery of works that are already free of known copyright restrictions

Note:  Adapted from (Creative Commons, 2015)

All in all, there are many options creators can choose to share their works on the Internet with as many or as little restrictions as desired.  Organizations such as Creative Commons provide tools and licenses applicable for each type of accessibility option in formats designed for the legal definitions, definitions for the common individual to understand, as well as machine readable for tracking and monitoring on the Internet.  Advances in technology have allowed many devices to access the information, including E-Books.  Ethically, with such sharability of resources, it is imperative that ethical standards for use of these resources be followed to maximize the flow of knowledge and information using the Internet while maintaining proper credit and authorship rights.

 References

Creative Commons. (2015, February 3). Creative Commons. Retrieved from Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/

Johnson, L., Adams, S., & Haywood, K. (2011). The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from New Media Consortium: http://utetpt5550.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/49357920/2011-Horizon-Report-K12.pdf

Wikipedia. (2015, February 3). Wikipedia Free Content. Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content