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.<\/p>\n
This is a good question. This is what I *want* to be true.<\/p>\n
When I put a CC-BY at the front – that covers my original material and my “organization\/structure” of the material.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I have taken to including the following copyright statement in all my slides:<\/p>\n
Unless otherwise noted, the content of this course material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/3.0\/.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2009, Charles Severance, Jim Eng<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n