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

One of the core principles of Attribution license choice is the importance of interoperablity between licenses: the extent to which open content can be combined with other content due to license restrictions. In its report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “An Examination of the Licensing Policies of Open Educational Organizations and Projects,” ccLearn of Creative Commons concludes that “the terms of different licenses are often incompatible with one another in a way that prevents combining materials from different providers” (13), and as a result, recommends the use of Attribution only, as do others in the OER community (e.g., Hilton, et.al.; Bissell 104). Because Attribution offers the single restriction of attribution (incidentally, creators can specify how that attribution should occur), Attribution-licensed content combines well with other Creative Commons licensed content and can be re-released under other licenses. On the other hand, content available under a Share Alike license can be combined with other Share Alike content or Attribution-licensed works, or even content in the public domain (i.e. content no longer subject to copyright), but it must be released with a Share Alike license (Figure 1).

So, for example, I am reusing the table in Figure 1 from the CC Wiki. Suppose that this table was not available for me to use under fair use.⁶ Because it was originally licensed as Attribution, I can combine it with this article that I choose to release under a Share Alike license. But I could instead choose to release this article under any of the compatible licenses listed in the table (see the row in the table with the “by” term highlighted in red). However, in this imaginary scenario of no fair use rights, had the table at the CC Wiki been licensed under a Share Alike license, I could only release this article under a Share Alike license (see the row with the “by-sa” term highlighted in purple).

Figure 1. Creative Commons license compatibility chart and abbreviation key. Frequently Asked Questions. CC Wiki.

Critics of copyleft can easily point to many examples where Share Alike creates problems for licensing or remixing with other content. For instance, in The Illogical Rhetoric of Share Alike, Leigh Blackall, the Learning Commons Coordinator for the University of Canberra National Institute of Sport Studies, cites three instances where he believes Share Alike an unsuitable licensing choice:

1. An educational institution is working with a commercial partner who does not want “to mix learning content with commercially sensitive content (such as blue prints to machinery, patented product designs, or anything that the partner still perceives is necessary to remain restricted in access and copy)” that must be released under Share Alike because “they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that doing so would result in a loss of income and competitive advantage.”
2. An educational institution might work with a “culturally sensitive group or individual” who wants “to restrict access and copyrights” to protect the materials.
3. An institution may have “a large database of materials created long before CC or copyleft existed” where permissions obtained from the original copyright holder do not allow for the “remix” of content by others.

Another consideration: Creative Commons’ Share Alike may not combine well with other copyleft licenses. Prior to 2007, Wikipedia was still licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), a license created by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for use with computer documentation.  Because of the specific requirements of the FDL that it be licensed under the exact same license, copyleft content in Wikipedia could not be combined with Creative Commons Share Alike content on the Internet. A similar problem existed with Wikiversity’s GNU FDL licensed content (see Appendix D, Example III in ccLearn’s report). It wasn’t until the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons rewrote their licenses to allow for license migration to other copyleft licenses that Wikipedia was converted to Share Alike (Bollier 177, 214-216).

Next: Avoiding the Freedom Argument