This is the second of several postings describing potential innovations to our licenses. It comes courtesy of Rob Hallman, a Stanford Law School student in the “Advanced Contracts: Creative Commons” seminar.

Commons.edu?

You have the power to make learning fun. At least partly. Promoting education is a personal goal and a corporate mission for many copyright holders. If you have creative work that you’d like to share with students and educators, but you don’t want people to use it for other purposes, an “educational purposes” license option may be just your size. “Educational purposes” gives the green light to any use of a work in a classroom setting.
There are all sorts of classrooms (including virtual), and we’d like to include them all, as long as they’re run by a legitimate educational institution, commercial or not.

But what about fair use? We don’t imagine that this “educational purposes” provision would replace or compete with fair use. Instead, this provision is designed to allow copyright holders to share even more usage rights with students and educators than fair use allows. We want students and educators to feel confident that their use is legal and happy that the artist or owner is a willing accomplice in the learning process.

Educational Purposes. The licensor permits students or educators to copy, distribute, display, and perform the Work in whole or in part for educational purposes as defined in this section.

Educational purposes include classroom use affiliated with an educational institution, research or other projects developed and displayed exclusively for classroom use, or for the review of instructor(s), or degree-conferring committees, where:

Educational institutions include individuals, corporations or trusts, commercial or noncommercial, whose primary purpose is educational, and whose educational purpose is demonstrable through governmental recognition or through comportment consistent with a customary understanding of educational purpose among practitioners in the field.

Classrooms include the traditional classroom setting as well as other recognized forums for instruction or coursework that are administered by an educational institution. On-line and other nontraditional “classrooms” will be considered classrooms for the purposes of this definition where they are the forum for a legitimate course, seminar, or instructional program administered by an educational institution.

Students are a distinct, limited community currently participating with the permission of an educational institution in a course, seminar, or other program with an educational purpose offered by that institution. Student status is coextensive with the duration of the course, seminar, or program.

Educators are full-time or part-time/adjunct faculty, administration or staff of an educational institution.

Can this be simpler? Should it be broader? Narrower? Tell us why you’d use it or why you wouldn’t.