Creative Distribution Licenses
From Bjoern Hassler
Contents |
[edit] 1 "Creative Distribution" licenses
I am a great fan of creative commons, and it would be great if all educational resources were creative commons.
However, particularly within the educational video world (see e.g. http://podcast.steeple.org.uk) only a tiny proportion of content is available as creative commons. However, the remainder of the content is still free, but it's "All rights reserved."
For course materials, which are a composite form of media, CC is highly desirable, because without CC, you can't really make a lot of use of the content. However, with movies, it may not be so crucial to be able to disaggregate, or to share disaggregated results publicly. Also, while there is a good amount of CC licensed course materials, there are less Cc licenses (academically produced) videos.
Of course that's highly regrettable, but given that this is the case, what can be done?
Before CC there was only
[All rights reserved.] <- ??? -> [public domain]
This gulf was then spanned by creative commons:
[All rights reserved.] <--> [creative commons] <--> [public domain]
But perhaps we now need to bridge the " [All rights reserved.] <--> [creative commons] " space with another set of licenses, which I'd like to call 'creative distribution' licenses:
[All rights reserved.] <--> [creative distribution] <--> [creative commons] <--> [public domain]
[edit] 2 "Creative distribution" (CD) license ideas
The idea with the CD license is to offer additional features above "All rights reserved" that give content users important additional freedoms.
[edit] 2.1 Creative Distribution like ERA (CD-ERA)
On CD license could be modeled on the ERA scheme (cf. e.g. Copyright). The ERA scheme licenses use of certain broadcasts from certain broadcasters for certain uses within education. For instance, within a (UK) educational establishment that has the ERA license, a BBC program can be recorded off air, and I can extract clips from the program, store these or teach with these, provided the materials are properly labeled. However, the ERA license does not apply to podcasts, and does not apply to broadcasts from non-ERA broadcasters.
So a suggestion for a "Creative Distribution" license could be the "CD-ERA" license, where a non-ERA broadcaster/podcaster (such as the University of Cambridge) grants the user the right to use the material as if it was licenses under the ERA scheme. I.e. the same freedoms as the ERA scheme grants, with the same obligations and restrictions.
Particularly for use within education, this could be a great advantage to the end user, without taking away too much from the producers.
[edit] 2.2 Creative "Re"Distribution (CD-R): Caching (CD-R-C) and peer to peer (CD-R-P2P)
This license would allow users to redistribute the content, under certain conditions:
- Non-commercial: You cannot charge for redistributing the content in any way (perhaps not even to recover costs)
- Non-public (i.e. you cannot publicly re-host the content)
However, persistent caching of the content on your local network is ok under the CD-R-C license, perhaps provided that
- your caching system notifies the content producer every time the content is used (i.e. content would need to be kept within a special cache)
Also, peer to peer distribution of the content is ok (under CD-R-P2P), under the same conditions, i.e. notification of the content producer.
One could then construct certain distribution system that met those requirements, that could be used to distribute content to countries with low bandwidth.
[edit] 2.3 Creative Distribution by embedding (CD-Embed)
This license allows others to embed the content on 3rd part portals. It doesn't allow re-hosting, but allows the content to embedded (like you would embed a youtube video). For instance, to be able to run a site like http://podcast.steeple.org.uk, the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and then the Open University would to make their content available (either to the world, or to the site owner) a CD-Embed license.
