Inellectual Property Issues

May 20, 2003

1. Ideas

• http://www.opensource.uwa.edu.au/home/courseware:
  • An initiative at UWA is to release material for specific units (courses) under an Open Source license. This enables anyone to use the material offered for their own purposes, etiher to teach a similar unit based on the material or simply for self-educational purposes.
  • The policy link is broken :(.
• http://ocw.mit.edu/global/terms-of-use.html: MIT Open courseware "Creative Commons License":
  • Full license: http://ocw.mit.edu/global/license.html.
  • Based on creative commons (see below): Attribution; Noncommercial; Share Alike.
• http://creativecommons.org/: The Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.
  • There are a total of eleven Creative Commons licenses to choose from.

• http://opensource.org/licenses/osl.php

  • contains a listing of many popular open source licenses (about 40 of them), including the famous GPL (GNU). Our challenge is to come up with one that works for courseware (by using or adapting from an existing one.) The difference in course contents and software are many.
    

2. Narrative

The United States and many other countries have laws granting creative works automatic copyright by default upon their creation. An appropriate set of copyright licenses will thus be required to enhance the sharing, copying, distribution and collaboration of the coursework in this project. These licenses should be "sturdy enough to withstand a court's scrutiny, simple enough for non-lawyers to use, and yet sophisticated enough to be identified by various Web applications" [creativecommonsfaq].

There are many open source software copyright licenses available (for examples, there are about 40 licenses in opensource.org [opensourcelicense]). Because of the difference in the artifact's nature, open source courseware licenses will not be identical to that of open source courseware. A good basis of licenses for this project will be MIT open Courseware license [mitopencoursewarelicense], which is in turn based on selection of the eleven licenses available in Creative Commons [creativecommons]. Although the team is reasonably familiar with the copyright issues, a legal expert will obviously be needed to develop a set of suitable copyright licenses for the project. Dr. Sun, a legal expert in copyright and patent, has agreed to provide this assistance [please see the support letter of Dr. Sun] (or something similar to this for Dr. Sun's description.)

3. References of Narrative

[creativecommonsfaq] Creative Commons FAQ,http://creativecommons.org/faq.
[opensourcelicense] The Open Software License v. 1.1, http://opensource.org/licenses/osl.php.
[mitopencoursewarelicense] MIT Open Courseware License 1.0, http://ocw.mit.edu/global/license.html.
[creativecommons] Create commons's home page, http://creativecommons.org/.