Notes
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David Wiley and Stephen Downes are famously known in the OER community for their debates about open content licensing. For example, see Wiley’s Misunderstanding Stephen and Downes’ Open Content, Enclosure and Conversion.
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The human readable deeds for Creative Commons licenses are a summary of the rights given in the legal code of the license (available as a link at the end of each deed) written for end users of the content. As Fred Benenson explains on the Creative Commons weblog in response to Facebook’s modification of their Terms of Service agreement, “The human readable deed (which you will be familiar with if you’ve ever clicked on a CC badge) allows users and authors of content to clearly understand what rights the public has to use a work and what obligations to the original creator must be upheld. More specifically, human readable license deeds, CC’s metadata infrastructure and our brand all work together to avoid the kind of confusion and panic Facebook’s amended Terms of Service caused. By using a CC license as the default license for a platform, such as on the free-as-in-speech microblog community Identi.ca, both administrators and users can be clear about how their work will be reused by the public because CC licenses are a standard now adopted by millions of people.”
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Unported Creative Commons licenses have not been custom-tailored for a specific country’s intellectual property laws.
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For the purpose of brevity, here and in the rest of this text, I will refer to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) as “Share Alike” and the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) as “Attribution.” Note that it is no longer possible on Creative Commons to configure a license with Share Alike without Attribution.
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Outside of the open source community, the term “copyleft” has sometimes been appropriated by the media and academia, as well as businesses hoping to align themselves with the open source movement, to include any open source type license. In this text, I will use a definition that is more informed by how copyleft is interpreted and used in computer culture.
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Creative Commons licenses do not negate fair use rights normally available under copyright law; I would be within my rights to use this table even if it had not been Creative Commons licensed at all.
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