Stewart Brand, author, futurist, and original publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, once proclaimed, "Information wants to be free." Plagiarists, software pirates, file-sharers, and others have claimed the phrase as justification for their actions. If someone posts a document, they reason, it becomes fair game to take and use it.
But what is often neglected is the rest of Brand's comment: "Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine-too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property,' the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
Brand's observations are as valid today as they were when he first made them 20 years ago. In higher education, which thrives on the sharing of information, the internet has not only made that sharing easier than ever, it has also made improperly acquiring and using documents easier. No one would suggest that the solution would be to somehow shut down the internet, so other control methods need to be found.
Conventional copyright laws can often be overly restrictive, especially when the creator's intent is to share his or her work openly. That's where the organization Creative Commons enters the picture. Founded in 2001 by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, CC is a nonprofit devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The CC website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public, while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. Its intent is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
"Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes," reads the introduction to the site. "At one pole is a vision of total control-a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which 'all rights reserved' (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy-a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation-once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally-have become endangered species."
"There is discussion on many campuses about who owns what when it comes to teaching materials, but the Creative Commons model resolves those questions."
-Steve Carson, MIT
Creative Commons licenses are available for websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, and other content. So far, more than 4.5 million works have been licensed through Creative Commons. Higher education has also begun to see the value of the Creative Commons model. For example, Rice University (Texas) makes course materials available for distribution and reuse under the CC license through the university's Connexions Repository.
Likewise, the Berklee College of Music (Mass.) offers free, downloadable music lessons from the Berklee Shares website.
Perhaps one of the greatest experiments in protecting owners' rights in an open environment is the OpenCourseWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Launched in 2001, the OCW project's goal is to publish and make freely available on the internet course materials from some 2,000 courses. Just five years later the project already lists 1,250 courses, says Steve Carson, senior strategist for OCW at MIT.
OCW was in the planning stages at about the same time Creative Commons was forming, and the two projects share a similar goal. It may even be that the concurrently developed projects influenced one another. "Hal Abelson, one of the MIT faculty who created OCW, certainly knows Larry Lessig," says Carson, "so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some discussions between the two men as the project was developing." Abelson now sits on the CC board of directors.
"Interestingly, the Creative Commons model was almost exactly what we were following at the start," says Carson. "We eventually realized that they were doing the same thing we were doing, so in the last year we went though a process of convergence to make sure that our license lined up exactly with their license so we are now officially adopters of the Creative Common license although we've had a similar license for years. We both came up with the same three principles: attribution, noncommercial use, and share-alike."
