Last month, ccLearn published “Otherwise Open: Managing Incompatible Content in OER“. For those of you who never got around to reading the paper, it basically provides an overview of the problem posed by the incorporation of “all-rights-reserved” materials into otherwise open educational resources (OER). It also explores ways of dealing with this problem and the…

Hannes Grobe / CC BY-SA Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is perhaps the most prolific blogger on the ill impact of overly restrictive legal regimes, including of course copyright and patents, but also trademark and even employment law (see Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of Human Capital) and often on people delivering real value to customers (sad…

CC is pleased to announce that the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in collaboration with the Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, has recently published a new study entitled, An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies, Practices and Opportunities, by Philllip Malone. From the announcement, “This project… undertook to…

If you haven’t already, break up your Monday with the OER Copyright Survey. It only takes ten minutes, and it’s for a good cause—mainly to “gather information regarding the ways in which copyright law plays a role in, and perhaps acts as a barrier to, the practices of those who create or facilitate the production…

Last year, I blogged about the Copyright Advisory Network‘s nifty digital copyright slider, a tool that helps you tell whether a work is still copyrighted or whether it’s in the public domain. Since then, the OITP at ALA (Office for Information Technology Policy of the American Library Association) has developed and published two new tools:…

If you’re reading the Creative Commons blog, chances are you’re aware of the fact that the United States federal government is not entitled to copyright protection for their works. If you didn’t know this, check out the Wikipedia article on the subject, or some of our past blog posts on the subject. This means that…

When it comes to copyright, our youth are too often bombarded with extremes. The entertainment industry giants propagate a skewed perspective by launching anti-copying educational programs, leaving out much of the balanced information necessary to cultivating user’s awareness about her real rights to a resource. This results in students thinking that they can react in…

Last November, the Center for Social Media at AU released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which followed on the heels of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. These guides were aimed at clearing up many of the urban myths surrounding copyright, especially when…

Through its Copyright Advisory Group, the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) has published a Creative Commons information pack online, a bundle of eight documents that distills the basics of CC licensing and the philosophy behind it. This pack is a great resource for educators and students, and we encourage…

For those of you interested in knowing how Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (known as Fair Use in the US) might affect open educational resources, there will be a working session on CEL at OCWC Global 2009 in Monterrey, Mexico next month. OCWC Global 2009 is the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s first international conference of its kind. The…