There has been quite a lot of discussion about licensing content and software in Australia this last week. I wanted to raise it here as it involves the education sector, government, and now a guild.
Not everyone has observed threading, so where I have provided a couple of links to list archives, follow the first link using "Next message", then when the subject changes use the second link.
Free for Education http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2005-March/060999.html http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2005-March/061077.html "Free for Education" http://www.aesharenet.com.au/FfE/ license endorsed by the education minister and marketed by a privatised company. "
MEAA halts world-first film project in Australia http://rights.apc.org.au/culture/2005/03/meaa_halts_worldfirst_film_project_in_australia.php "Film company, MOD Films, employing Creative Commons licensing, was refused any dispensation from the Australian Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) to contract local actors to an interactive re-mixable sci-fi film called Sanctuary."
Disucssion about MEAA, CC, and licenses continued on many lists, but Link has a public archive. http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2005-March/061068.html http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2005-March/061152.html
Brendan Scott who contributed to the above discussions also wrote on another list (not publically archived and I have obtained permission to forward) about the CC licenses (http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/).
On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 02:08:13PM +1100, Brendan Scott wrote: "I have recently had a couple of rants about the FfE [Free for Education] licence and, indirectly, the CC licences. Do not think for a second that there is necessarily a conceptual equivalence between CC licences and Open Source. See (eg): http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2005-March/061002.html
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2005-March/061058.html";
And in response to "Obviously the "No Derivative Works" CC licence goes against the GNU spirit, but what's wrong with "Share Alike"?" Brendan replied:
"My point is that CC is presented as a sort of "open content". But included within CC licences are clearly licences which are clearly closed - eg any licence with no commercial use, no derivative works components. By identifying this whole bag of licences is, in my view counterproductive. It would be like identifying shared source with open source (and we can guess who likes to do that). Added to which trying to find out their licences is an exercise in frustration and their comics are extremely irritating, but they're side issues."
This is not news, but a couple of days ago I heard on the radio an interview with an academic talking about his negotiation with a journal publisher for his peer-reviewed paper to have an open content type license. He was urging other people to seek out publishers that adopt open content policies. The programme was on http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ but my cursory search has not found anything as yet.
If you are a writer then you may negotiate on a piece by piece basis, or adopt a publication or organisation wide copyright license. Sometimes tenders and grants have quite onerous copyright assignment, and I must admit if there is OSS involved I prefer to turn down the work if I cannot feed it back into the OSS community under an appropriate license.
Regards Jacqueline
