{"id":1338,"date":"2013-04-17T04:05:06","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T11:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/?p=1338"},"modified":"2014-05-12T16:19:43","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T23:19:43","slug":"cc-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/2013\/04\/17\/cc-what\/","title":{"rendered":"CC-What? Part 1: No NC (#h817open, activity 9)"},"content":{"rendered":"

For week three of the<\/span> Open Education course at the Open University<\/a><\/span> that I am participating in (though <\/span>we are now in<\/span> week 5), one of the activities is to choose a Creative Commons license for<\/span> “your blog content and other material you produce.”<\/a> <\/span>Of course, the latter is so vague that it might be difficult for some to say what license they might use for all of it, as they might end up using different licenses for different things. I am likely to just use one, but I may be in the minority.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have already gone through some soul-searching on this very issue, but in a direction I haven’t seen in any of the other blogs I’ve looked at for this course: in<\/span> an earlier post<\/a><\/span> I asked why even use CC-BY instead of, say, CC0<\/a><\/span>, which is more like putting one’s work into the public domain. I’m still undecided, but at this point (as you can tell from this site) am still using CC-BY for my blog.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what I haven’t done is try to explain why I use CC-BY instead of CC-BY-NC (non commercial) or SA (share alike) on my blog, and why I would probably use CC-BY on any OER I might create (unless I decide to use CC0 instead). <\/span>Generally, I use CC-BY\u00a0 because I want to leave my work free for anyone to use however they like. But the issues involved are really quite complicated.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m only going to discuss NC and SA and SA in this and the next post<\/a><\/span>, because I can’t imagine asking people not to make derivatives of what I create–it just seems part of sharing freely, to me, that people can revise and remix my work. This post is about why I don’t use CC-BY-NC, and the next<\/a><\/span> is about why I don’t use CC-BY-SA.
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[Thanks to<\/span> David Kernohan<\/a><\/span>, Pat Lockley<\/a><\/span>, Brian Lamb,<\/a><\/span> Rob Myers<\/a><\/span> and<\/span> Joss Winn<\/a><\/span> for providing some links and ideas on Twitter that I’ve used in this and the next post<\/a><\/span>.]<\/span><\/p>\n

Commercial use<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve read several blog posts in the OU Open Education course that opt for CC-BY-NC\u00a0 (such as<\/span> this one by Nick Hood<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0this one by David (I can’t find a last name) <\/a><\/span>,<\/span> this one by Daniela Signor<\/a><\/span> and<\/span> this one by Sukaina Walji.<\/a><\/span>) Some express the sentiment that if they are giving away things for free, then they don’t want others to be making money off of them. I have to say that I kind of get this sentiment, but also not. I guess the idea is that if any money is to be made from what is produced, then the producer should be the one to benefit rather than someone who has just taken the content for free. This sentiment seems to make sense in a market economy, where many people feel that their work should be compensated monetarily if someone else is making money from it; alternatively, some may think it wrong for others to make money from something they have either not worked on or not paid for.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, this sort of thinking should lead people to support open access publishing, since, increasingly, there is not much that publishers do that justifies them closing off access to publications and charging a fee…but that’s an argument for another day (and more complex than I’m making it out here, yes).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Bye Bye Ship<\/a> by Paulo Ordoveza.<\/a> Licensed CC-BY<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Gifts<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I get the idea that if money is being made from something, it seems fair to give some money to those who created the item in the first place. But it seems to me that once you decide to give your work away to be used, altered and remixed by others, it might be better thought of as a gift than a market commodity. And when you give something away as a gift, you might be said to be allowing the recipient(s) to do whatever they like with it. Sure, some people might be a bit upset if they gave a gift that another person decided to sell–but would they be upset because the other person made money off of something that they got for free and therefore didn’t have the right to make money from? To me, that doesn’t really make sense; if you give it away, it becomes someone else’s to do with as they wish.
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When I give my stuff away, I’m saying goodbye to control over what happens to it afterwards, because it’s no longer just mine.<\/span><\/p>\n

I realize that one of the benefits of CC licenses, though, is to allow people flexibility in the degree to which they want to think of their creations as gifts. And some people won’t accept that way of thinking. So here are some other thoughts.<\/span><\/p>\n