Plaintext
Creative Commons Licensing,
In Vitro and In Vivo
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan@poritz.net
poritz.net/jonathan
24 March 2022
Open Scholarship Café
NUI Galway
This slide deck, except where otherwise indicated, is by Jonathan Poritz and is released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
An editable form of these slides is available at poritz.net/jonathan/share/vitrovivo/ .
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 1 / 24
Land acknowledgement
Before we begin, I must acknowledge that I am physically located at
this moment within the unceded territory of the Ute Peoples. The
earliest documented people in this area also include the Apache,
Arapaho, Comanche, and Cheyenne. An extended list of tribes
with a legacy of occupation in this area can be found here: Colorado
Tribal Acknowledgement List.
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 2 / 24
Some background
Kris and I were introduced by the wonderful Paola Corti, OE Community Manager for
SPARC Europe; see her work on the European Network of Open Education Librarians
(ENOEL).
Paola and I have worked together on the Creative Commons Certificate Course. I’ve
taught 220 students in that course from 19 countries, in 9 sections since June of 2019.
Among those sections were both “Educator” and “Librarian” versions of the course, even
though I’m a faculty member.
For background, Kris pointed me to a page Publishing NUI Galway Open Educational
Resources (OERs) for Effective Learning and added (maybe too modestly?) that
“Unlike North America, OER is a pretty new space for Libraries to be con-
tributing in Ireland, particularly in the space of OER creation.”
The plan:
• Why we care about Creative Commons (CC) licensing in open education
• Focus on licensing issues that come up fairly often in OER practice.
• Discussion!!
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 3 / 24
The UNESCO OER Definition
UNESCO unanimously adopted its OER Recommendation on 25 November 2019.
That Recommendation includes the definitions
“1. Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research
materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or
are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that
permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by
others.
2. Open license refers to a license that respects the intellectual property rights
of the copyright owner and provides permissions granting the public the
rights to access, re-use, repurpose, adapt and redistribute educational ma-
terials.”
Note the similarity to David Wiley’s 5Rs of Open.
After a confusion of different definitions due to the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, Creative Commons, and others, we should take this definition as canonical:
193 countries’ diplomats can’t be wrong!
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 4 / 24
The augmented CC license spectrum
Mapping the clauses in that UNESCO OER definition to the CC license suite –
augmented by the two CC public domain tools and, because there are still people outside
of the open movement, all-rights-reserved copyright – we get:
Least Freedom
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 5 / 24
What about OER to which CC licenses should not be applied?
CC recommends that their licenses not be applied to software. But some OER may
incorporate, or even consist almost entirely of, software.
Here are licenses commonly used for FLOSS1 , as collected by the Open Source Initiative:
• Apache License 2.0
• BSD 3-Clause ”New” or ”Revised” license
• BSD 2-Clause ”Simplified” or ”FreeBSD” license
• GNU General Public License (GPL)
• GNU Library or ”Lesser” General Public License (LGPL)
• MIT license
• Mozilla Public License 2.0
• Common Development and Distribution License
• Eclipse Public License version 2.0
And there are more!
I have not checked which of these satisfy the UNESCO OER Definition, but I do know
that the GPL does: it’s quite parallel to CC BY-SA. [I always use the GPL on my code.]
1
FLOSS=”Free/Libre/Open-Source Software”
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 6 / 24
Licensing issues that come up in OER practice
Let’s take a tour of some licensing issues that I have seen in OER practice:
• Licensing software
• Who gets to apply a CC license?
• How to do a proper attribution?
• OER and exceptions and limitations to copyright: the TASL habit
• Collections vs adaptations/remixes
• Licenses on collections
• Licenses on adaptations
• Licenses on remixes
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 7 / 24
Licensing software
We already talked about this, on the slide named
What about OER to which CC licenses should not be applied?
Note those considerations apply
• to OER which are simulation, such as the PhET Interactive Simulations for Science
and Math
• Jupyter, Mathematica, and Sagemath Notebooks
• problems written in the WeBWorK homework system
• [maybe] H5P tasks
• more?
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 8 / 24
Who gets to apply a CC license?
While CC licenses seem to negate or be the opposite of copyright, in fact they get their
force from the powers copyright laws give to rightsholders.
So someone who doesn’t own the copyright on a work cannot put a CC license on it.
In the US, with a strong works-for-hire default in the Copyright Act, this can mean that
employees cannot put CC licenses on works they create. In academia in the US, this is
typically true of non-tenure-line faculty, many staff (sometimes librarians).
There can be a role for good policy to increase equity in this situation.
What is the situation in Ireland?
Even if Ireland does works-for-hire better than the US, what happens when works in one
country are used in another? [Remember, by the principle of territoriality, the copyright
law that applies is the law in the country where the use was made, not the law in the
country where the work was created!]
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 9 / 24
How to do a proper attribution?
All CC licenses have the BY clause, meaning that reusers must always give attribution.
There are helpful tools, or just remember: TASL.
Title: What is the name of the work?
Author: Who owns the work?
Source: Where can it be found? (Provide link if possible.)
License: Which license is the work distributed under? (Provide link
to creativecommons.org license source.)
Academics need to get in the habit of always giving good [TASLed] attribution
statements whenever they make a copyright-significant use of a CC-licensed work.
Note that attribution is not the same thing as scholarly citation! Attribution is legally
required, should follow TASL, and applies when one is using another work’s expression
but not when using only the underlying facts or ideas.
Citation is required by scholarly norms, should follow MLA or APA or whatever citation
formatting your context demands, and applies when one is using another works
expressions, facts, and/or ideas.
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 10 / 24
OER and exceptions and limitations to copyright: the TASL habit
Many countries have exceptions and limitations to copyright, such as fair use/dealing,
specific educational exemptions to copyrights, exceptions to copyright which apply when
a person with a physical disability needs access to a copyrighted work, etc.
When an exception or limitation applies to a use, it is as if the powers of copyright have
taken a vacation for that use. Since CC licenses need the power of copyrights to have
any force, this means that all CC license terms are in abeyance for that use.
Nevertheless, because of territoriality and since E&Ls vary a lot from country to country,
it is a good idea to do good TASLing even to those uses when not required in your
particular jurisdiction, and to warn downstream users and adapters of concerns (like NC
or SA) which might apply to their uses, depending upon the laws in their countries.
If we believe in value of sharing our work, we should, e.g., give a good TASL attribution
and explain the E&L analysis we might make in some particular situation, even though it
is not legally required, because that will help users in other jurisdictions perform their
own E&L analysis and, possibly, use a require TASL.
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 11 / 24
Collections vs adaptations/remixes
There is an odd feature in copyright law, which is in fact called out with respect in the
legal code for CC licenses, that gives a thin copyright to the creator of a collection.
A collection is an arrangement of identical2 copies of other works, put in a particular
configuration with possible some new material added, such as a title, cover art, and
introduction, etc.
The copyright in a collection applies only to the arrangement and choice of works, and to
any new material added.
A remix3 is also a new work which incorporates other, prior works, or parts thereof,
within it, but those works have all been changed by the addition of new creativity from
the remixer, and are not merely copied.
An anthology of stories is a common example of a collection, whereas a book which
brings together stories from several foreign languages and translates each of them into
the local language is a remix, since translation is a creative act so each of the stories has
been significantly modified. An image which uses clipped fragments from other images in
place of parts of the original version of the image is a remix of all of those images, since
it has lots of added creativity and yet incorporates prior works.
2
well, identical in the sense of copyright law, so one may shift formats, such as Word→PDF, and fix small typos
3
also called a derivative work or adaptation
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 12 / 24
Licenses on collections
Think of a collection as the plural of a copy, with only a thin bit of originality (and
copyright) for the selection and arrangement of the collected items. A CC license on a
collection, then, would only be licensing that thin part.
E.g., an ND on a collection license would mean that no one could make a collection
which was based on but slightly different from the original collection, in terms of the
selection and arrangement of the collected pieces.
If your collection contains only CC-licensed items, then everything should be fine, since
you are only using the right to copy those works which is a right given to the public in all
CC licenses.
It is a good idea to use the NC clause in a collection license if one of the collected items
has that clause in its license. Otherwise it would look to a user of the collection like they
could sell copies of the collection for a profit, but such a sale would include, implicitly, a
sale of the item in the collection which has the NC license on it, and so that sale could
not be for profit.
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 13 / 24
Licenses on adaptations, CC version
The CC FAQ has as chart which tells adapters of CC-licensed works what licenses they
may use on their adaptations:
4
I hate this chart – which my OER AACing5 colleagues need all the time.
4
“Adapter’s license chart” by Creative Commons was released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
5
I use “AAC,” pronounced like the word “ace,” for the “adopt/adapt/create” we need all the time in the OER world.
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 14 / 24
Licenses on adaptations, JP version
A web page of mine has a much better version of the chart which helps adapters choose
licenses:
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 15 / 24
Licenses on adaptations, JP version, key
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 16 / 24
Compatibility for remixes, CC version
The same CC FAQ has as chart which tells remixers of CC-licensed works when their
remixes are permitted:
6
I also hate this chart.
6
“Remix Compatibility chart” by Creative Commons was released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 17 / 24
Compatibility for remixes, the idea
It’s quite easy to reason one’s way to the remixer’s chart: a license on work A is
compatible with a license on work B if there is some single license that is both a valid
adapter’s license for A and a valid adapter’s license for B.
In fact, one can repeat that same thought exercise with more than just two works to
figure out charts that tell if remixes of more than two CC-licensed works will be possible.
[Those charts will be three- or higher-dimensional, though.]
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 18 / 24
Compatibility for remixes, JP version
A web page of mine has a much better version of the remix compatibility chart:
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 19 / 24
Compatibility for remixes, JP version, key
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 20 / 24
Licenses on remixes, JP version
That same web page of mine tells what licenses may be used on remixes, when there is a
possible remix:
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 21 / 24
Licenses on remixes, JP version, key
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 22 / 24
Conclusion: “good” scholarship/pedagogy must be open
For all of the reasons outlined in the UNESCO OER Recommendation, good pedagogy
must be open. For all of the reasons that the Open Access movement has been repeating
for years, good scholarship must also be open.
It also just seems to work, to do scholarship/pedagogy in the open. I pretty much accept
this as an article of faith.7
In the world today, where we must fight against the suffocating neoliberal dystopia which
tries to make all goods private and to eliminate public goods, we must use the tools of
open licensing to support our open pedagogy and scholarship.
To use these tools well requires some hard work with the details. Study of these details8
will be amply repaid in your ease of operation in the open realm.
7
although there is plenty of historical evidence, such as the great example of the contrasting impact over thousands of years of Pythagoras, a horribly
secretive man, with that of Euclid, an early exponent of the way of open scholarship and pedagogy
8
such as by taking the Creative Commons Certificate Course
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 23 / 24
Discussion and contact info
Discussion!!
Contact info:
Email: jonathan@poritz.net ; Tweety-bird: @poritzj .
Get these slides at poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo.pdf and all files for remixing9 at
poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo/ .
If you don’t want to write down that full URL, just remember
poritz.net/jonathan/share
or poritz.net/j/share
or poritz.net/jonathan [then click Always SHARE]
or poritz.net/j [then click Always SHARE]
or scan −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→
[then click Always SHARE]
9
subject to CC-BY-SA 4.0
https://poritz.net/j/share/vitrovivo “CC Licensing In Vitro and In Vivo” (24 March 2022) Open Scholarship Café at NUI Galway 24 / 24