Joseph asked me whether I would put a CC-BY-SA (Share Alike) copyright on the front of my slide set if my general personal intent was the less restrictive CC-BY for the material if there was one artifact within the slide deck that was CC-BY-SA. Or should I put CC-BY-SA on the whole work just because it includes one item that was CC-BY-SA. Another way to ask this is whether I would be infected by the “viral” nature of CC-BY-SA. Here is my answer.

This is a good question. This is what I *want* to be true.

When I put a CC-BY at the front – that covers my original material and my “organization/structure” of the material.

Some material may have a different copyright inside – CC-BY-SA or even some more restrictive license. I should note the owner of those materials and the copyright of those materials (i.e. this picture of a puppy is Copyright CC-BY-SA Joseph Hardin).

In essence, when *I* place a copyright on the front – it is the copyright of my stuff – and not the transitive closure of my own copyright clearance efforts – in a sense, when I cay CC-BY at the front – it is “caveat emptor” – I am not indemnifying future users that I have made no mistakes w.r.t. transitive closure of included elements.

In a sense – for me there is always an implied statement like “Some stuff in here may be copyright the original owners” or something to that effect.

On the other hand when you OER folks carefully do all the clearance you can make a stronger statement. “This work is CC-BY and any included materials has been verified as compatible with CC-BY.” I am sure UM will never indemnify anyone in case the clearance made a mistake – but at least the statement reflects intent and effort and has a decent chance of being accurate. A user can feel more secure with such a statement.

I strongly object to putting CC-BY-SA on the front just because there is one CC-BY-SA artifact inside. I simply will not do it. But of course I am an irresponsible faculty member reprobate – and you are professional OER folk – so it is reasonable that rules might apply to OER that don’t apply to me.

I have taken to including the following copyright statement in all my slides:

Unless otherwise noted, the content of this course material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Copyright 2009, Charles Severance, Jim Eng

I removed all the other gobbledygook that the OER folks put in. This simple text feels more accurate and easily interpreted to me. I am perfectly happy to see the more complex copyright on the front when my slides come back out of OER processes. But frankly I am less inclined to reuse the slides that come back from OER if I have to keep the ugly copyright. So I have taken to reviewing the post-OER slides and pulling the changes I like into my slide set instead of just using the OER slide set – yes I know that is not how you want things to work – but I don’t like gobbledygook legalese about medical images in my slide decks.

And again *my* purpose of this copyright slide is (I think) different than Open.Michigan’s purpose. This slide is my handoff to Open.Michigan and my handoff to other faculty who might directly reuse/remix – I want to make clear to folks who take my materials directly that they have my blessing – as much blessing as I can legally give – essentially a quit claim to my (or our in the case of joint authors) materials.

When Jim and I flip-flop teaching a course like SI539 and he adapts one of my slide sets – he adds his name to the author page – since he also agrees to CC-BY. Then in a later semester I take his revised set and then further revise the slide set, both names stay in the copyright page of that slide set forever.

If I think about this generally, it makes no sense to me as an original author to do anything other than what I describe above. When I teach, I am not about to waste time “clearing material” – some might be fair use – some might be CC-BY-SA and some I might even get in trouble for using. So making my copyright statement be the transitive closure of the included materials is simply silly – and frankly since interpretation of those internal artifacts may depend on where geographically my material is reused and in what context (teaching a course or a public web site) – there is little point in me trying to transitively clear everything for future users.

There is a gentle motivation to find artifacts with CC-BY (or better) to use in my slides and I spend a bit of time to keep slides CC-BY. As an example, I use lower-quality clip art from Clipart: http://www.clker.com/search/networksym/1 because it is copyright free. Also I look to Wikipedia for pictures or perhaps do a CC-BY search on Flickr for something like a “Clown Car” which is just for fun distraction on a slide. But my patience is really pretty short on this – and I won’t compromise much on the User Experience of my slides in the name of copyright – and at some point I just finish the slide and move on.

I have learned tricks from the Open.Michigan folks on how and where to find safe stuff – it might be a good plan to collect these sources of CC-BY safe materials and share them amongst us all.
My worst behavior – that I need to fix – is not *obsessively* recording references for things like screen shots. I do pretty good most of the time – you and the Open.Michigan folk have trained me pretty well – but then I get in a hurry when I just have a few minutes before class…