Considerations for Creative Commons Licensing of Open Educational Resources: The Value of Copyleft

Given the difficulties with license interoperability and copyleft, an educator new to using Creative Commons licenses might wonder why anyone would choose copyleft at all? Yet, many people do. In August 2007, Wiley estimated that “over half of the world’s open content is copylefted” (“Open Education License Draft”). In their report to the Hewlett Foundation of 2008, ccLearn collected data on required license usage in 107 OER project sites. The table below (Figure 2) represents my summary of ccLearn’s data. Copyleft licenses were more popular by more than a 2:1 ratio.

Figure 2. OER Sites using standard licenses. Dated collated from  “An Examination of the Licensing Policies of Open Educational Organizations and Projects” by ccLearn, Appendix F, pp. 22-33.

What I believe we can take from the extensive use of copyleft, especially given the popularity of the Noncommercial clause in the chart above, is that there is great concern among content creators about the consequences of commons enclosure that can result from allowing unfettered commercial use. Much like the educators in the UNESCO Forum that first defined OER, many creators are likely concerned “that open courseware, freely available on the Web, could be misused by the unscrupulous preying on the unwary.” (UNESCO 3). Such fear of enclosure by commercial entities is a healthy paranoia. Intellectual property notables such as Lawrence Lessig, David Bollier, Pamuela Samuelson, Kembrew McLeod, and James Boyle have built academic publishing careers critiquing the tendency of corporations to do so.

This threat of enclosure is not limited merely to outside entities. Many colleges and universities have contracts with their faculty that make teachers work-for-hire authors, and the institutions take ownership of the curricular resources they produce. In speaking more in general to the resources that educators are producing for online education, computers and composition scholar Chris Werry points out that many educators have a general fear of a “loss of control” of the content produced as a result of the commercialization of higher education (129).  It’s no wonder that some educators adopt the perspective offered by two other scholars in our field, Colleen Reilly and Joseph Williams: 

Ironically, the outrage here is not so much about not getting paid for shared knowledge, it’s the infuriating notion that someone else is getting paid. Writing teachers, at least insofar as we claim a libratory agenda, vow to want to share all the knowledge we can for as little charge as possible. We just want to make absolutely sure that no one else makes a dime either. (73)

But are these reasons enough to choose Share Alike over Attribution? If the goal is to build a sustainable education commons, is the protection offered the commons by copyleft still achieving that goal of sustainability? For a well-balanced “evaluation” of whether or not to choose Share Alike, the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog suggests that creators must consider,

1. “The costs, if any, of allowing share-alike in terms of e.g. complexity and compatibility.”
2. “The benefits, if any, that share-alike provides by encouraging the creation of open data in the first place and in ensuring subsequent ‘sharing back’ by those who build upon that data.” (“Open Data: Openness and Licensing”)

As will be shown in the next few sections, copyleft can address both of these concerns because it does more than just prevent enclosure. As a consequence of its lack of interoperability with other licenses—a strength of copyleft, not a fault—copyleft enables some specific collaborative, community building conditions and encourages the right kind of commercial participation that, I would argue, can be an equitable tradeoff for interoperability.

Next: Applying Rhetorical Velocity