Tama’s eLearning Blog

Next month the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL, where I work) will be launching a new magazine-length publiction called CATLyst which will focus on issues around learning and teaching in higher education. As part of the first issue, I’ve reviewed Open Content Licensing, a new book put out by the Australian arm of the Creative Commons organisation. It’s pitched at a generalist audience (hence half the review really explaining why CC exists), but I thought it might be of interest to some blog reading folks anyway. Here we go…

Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 2007, $A26.95, ISBN: 9781920898519

Issues of copyright, intellectual property, fair dealing (to use the Australian term) or fair use (to use the American term) have huge importance in education and academia. Most academics have a foot in at least two camps, as a producer of intellectual property in the form of articles, software, patented means to produce material goods, and as an educator who needs to display, quote, demonstrate and play work done by others in the processes of teaching and encouraging student learning. Students equally need to have a very clear picture of what they can do with the intellectual property of others – otherwise lack of understanding can lead to plagiarism or copyright violation – but increasingly so, students are also producers of creative and intellectual works, both in print and multi-media forms, which fall under the auspices of copyright control in one shape or another.

It is widely acknowledged that the era of digital media has presented very real challenges to the legal and conceptual understandings of copyright law, exemplified by the debates about the primarily illegal downloading of music and films. However, as educators seek new ways to enhance learning, students are often being asked to create short films, image-laden slide presentations or construct websites. More to the point, students often find that while they can use certain material within an educational context, they cannot use the exact same presentation or production as part of a portfolio when seeking employment, because different copyright rules apply outside of the university context. What, then, is the best way to equip students – and academics – with the tools and understanding about what can and cannot be used in such presentations and productions? The monolith of copyright law tends to have two extremes: full copyright, which allows little re-use, if any; and items in the public domain, regarding which creators have had to relinquish any and all rights. However, in the past few years a number of organisations and initiatives have sought to find a middle path between these two extremes, and the most notable of these in Australia is explored in Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons.

Open Content centres on the Australian arm of the Creative Commons organisation, whose primary purpose is to allow creators to explicate their intended copyright. For example, using a Creative Commons license, creators may explicitly state that a work can be used as long as Attribution of the original authorship is given, and only in a non-commercial manner (this is but one of many possible ‘some rights reserved’ configurations). For educational purposes, such licensing is extremely useful as it means with proper citation these works could be used by students and academics alike both within and beyond educational contexts, without copyright violation (as long as no money is directly made in the process).

Open Content is edited by Brian Fitzgerald, Head of Queensland University of Technology’s Law School, who is also the chair of the Creative Commons organisation in Australia. The collection is based on a late 2005 conference which launched the Australian versions of the Creative Commons licenses and brought together local academics, producers and others, including Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law Professor, who began the Creative Commons organisation and, until recently, was also chairperson. The articles in Open Content range from the broad and philosophical, to those with a narrow focus on specific issues in production or distribution. For academics and for students, many articles provide important guidance about laws in Australia and specific ways Creative Commons licensing can be used in education. While it might be odd for many people to hear the head of a Law School talking about videogames, one of the most interesting articles is Brian Fitzgerald talking about ‘machinima’, which entails videos created using the virtual landscapes of videogames rather than the material world. In exploring who owns such productions, and who can share them, Fitzgerald makes a point which, broadly, summarises the issues and the value of Open Content to readers:

By recognising that copyright law should exist not only to protect investment in the production of intellectual property, but also encourage further creativity, innovation and social interaction, a balance can be sought which both protects game developers from piracy, and also protects the rights of players to play, and the ability of players to express themselves, inside and outside of games. [228]

The book is available in hardcopy, but in keeping with the Creative Commons philsophy, indivudual chapters are also available, free of charge, from the University of Sydney’s eScholarship Repository.