FEATURE - Preserving OERs for the Future

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-03-22

Summary:

"Needless to say, the Great Minds lawsuit has fostered a sense of anxiety and uncertainty among school districts in their use of OER materials, as Barbara Soots, the OER program manager for the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Washington, says in an interview with Education Week. Soots’ agency has supported the use of OERs, and she informally surveyed some Washington school leaders for their views of the dispute. The article says, 'One of the biggest worries is that districts would become tangled in a web of legal questions about their rights—or the rights of a company they hire—to produce the classroom materials teachers and students need right away, [Soots] said. It could end up ‘placing the responsibility on the educator, or the district, and that’s not really a good use of their time,’ Soots said. And it could impede ‘one of the stated benefits of open educational resources,’ she added, which is their easy accessibility and versatility.'

Not only does the lawsuit put K–12 OER adoption at risk, it also undermines the utility of the Creative Commons license used by Great Minds and many other entities worldwide. At the core of Great Minds’ argument is what actually constitutes noncommercial use. Granted, FedEx Office was benefiting financially from the revenue earned by making copies of the materials, but it was not benefiting from the use of the materials—which is what was in fact licensed by Great Minds to the school district.

The lawsuit also jeopardizes all other entities that are licensing materials by using Creative Commons noncommercial licenses, potentially putting them at risk should they also rely on third-party resources for copying. In addition, it makes the entire OER movement vulnerable to similar lawsuits. According to Peters, “Authors of OER, large and small, use these four CC licenses (and occasionally CC0): BY, BY SA, BY NC, BY NC SA. CC always encourages at a minimum that the ND licenses not be used when licensing OER. This is because the ND restriction precludes translation and other localization.”

It would seem that this is a pretty frivolous lawsuit, considering that the original licensing entity is not violating the terms of the agreement and misusing the materials, but instead is only using them for a noncommercial purpose. Hopefully, the court will view the litigation similarly and decide in favor of FedEx Office. Otherwise, the future of K–12 OER adoption and the Creative Commons NC licenses may be problematic at best, which would be a real shame considering the needs they both meet in education today. Disrupting Creative Commons’ efforts at this point would be disastrous. It is unclear when the court will address this case, so stay tuned for future developments."

Link:

http://www.infotoday.com/it/mar17/Christou--Preserving-OERs-for-the-Future.shtml

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Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

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Date tagged:

03/22/2017, 20:09

Date published:

03/22/2017, 16:09