The task for e-tivity 4.1 at the course #OCL4Ed is to write a Blog post of 700 - 900 words based on practical example to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute Creative Commons (CC) resources plus reflection on the exercise. In this Blog post I will like to:
- Reflect
on how creativity builds on the past
- Discover
how CC uses copyright law to provide permission to copy, distribute,
modify and share creative works
- Study
the components of the six CC licences
- Identify
the three layers of a CC licence, namely the legal code, the licence deed
and the machine readable code
- Study
the legal compatibility among different licence types when remixing
materials
For my own
preparing of material, writing etc, I always look if something similar already exists.
It is important to remember that Creative
Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They
work alongside copyright and
enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs. The crucial
is that with CC one can build forward on others work, and don´t have to
reinvent the wheel oneself all the time. This was also the meaning with
copyright from its very beginning, to give acknowledge to the originator/s. The
great issue with CC is that the originator clearly and conciously decides
her/hiselves, that allows the others as well to also decide tehmseles, and to
always acknowledge the creator.
In my experiences I dons see that much unfortunatly on revising,
remixing and distributions of others material. True OER users mean for example
tht real OERs are just materials with CC BY and CC BY SA. Most often
however, I see materials with the so called strongest CC licence. I would have
love to see more materials available with possibilities to really reuse and
remix so one can bild further on on ideas etc. Then it automatically will be
quality reviewed as well, with so called peer review. That’s whay I very much
appreciate the project on Open Edcuational Ideas.
As it is said in the introduction webpage of this project:
...the main purpose of licensing educational material under open licences is to
allow for anyone to use, re-use or re-purpose them. However, despite a strong
movement in recent years to publish such material, OER reuse is still not a
common practice in Higher Education, schools and enterprises. The project
intend to tackle these issues by enabling Open Education at an early stage:
instead of sharing complete OER or Open Educational Practices (OEP), the aim is
to share ideas in the early design process. Probably, through, this this
process a fundamentally different uptake of OER can be possible by creating
Emotional Ownership of OER from teh very start.
The three
layers of a CC licence, namely the legal code, the licence deed and the machine
readable code
The
public copyright licenses incorporate a unique and innovative “three-layer”
design. Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of
language and text formats that most lawyers know and love. This is call this the Legal Code layer of each license.
But
since most creators, educators, and scientists are not in fact lawyers, the
licenses are available in a format that normal people can read — the Commons
Deed (also known as the “human readable” version of the license). The Commons
Deed is a handy reference for licensors and licensees, summarizing and
expressing some of the most important terms and conditions. Think of the
Commons Deed as a user-friendly interface to the Legal Code beneath, although
the Deed itself is not a license, and its contents are not part of the Legal
Code itself.
The final layer of the license design recognizes that software, from
search engines to office productivity to music editing, plays an enormous role
in the creation, copying, discovery, and distribution of works. In order to
make it easy for the Web to know when a work is available under a Creative
Commons license, a “machine readable” version of the license is provided— a summary of the key freedoms and
obligations written into a format those
software systems, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand.
We developed A standardized way to describe licenses that software can
understand is developed and which is called CC Rights Expression Language (CC
REL) to accomplish this.
Searching for open content is an important function enabled by this
approach. One can use Google to
search for Creative Commons content, look for pictures at Flickr, albums at Jamendo, and general media
at spinxpress. The Wikimedia Commons, the
multimedia repository of Wikipedia, is
a core user of our licenses as well.
Taken
together, these three layers of licenses ensure that the spectrum of rights
isn’t just a legal concept. It’s something that the creators of works can
understand, their users can understand, and even the Web itself can understand.
