# Encouraging sharing without getting all lawyery


[![image ](http://reganmian.net/files/AgingHippiesLogo.jpg)](http://k.webring.com/hub?ring=aginghippiesarts)Recently,
both [Leigh
Blackall](http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/2009/08/looking-into-sky-open-ed-oh-nine.html)
and [Dave
Cormier](http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/02/22/oers-shining-light-new-textbook-model-or-harbinger-of-a-new-imperialism/)
have blogged about OER as the new colonialism, and on both blogs there
were lively discussions in the comment sections about what this meant.
One of the ideas discussed is that if you try to bring Creative Commons
to a context where copyright generally isn't well respected, you first
have to teach them to respect copyright.

(Indeed, it's funny, even myself - I shamelessly pirate, and often steal
non-open content, but if something is marked as CC ND, I'd never edit
it).

To many people, this is problematic, since they are very skeptical to
the idea of copyright at all, especially of imposing it on other
cultures. (These countries might already have signed on to international
treaties that import the legal frameworks, but this might not have done
much to affect practice). I've been very sympathetic to this line of
thought, and curious about how to resolve this problem.

On the one hand, there is a lot of great material being released
"openly" in for example
[India](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/12/05/worlds-largest-university-opens-almost-all-its-materials/),
[Indonesia](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/03/19/407-indonesian-textbooks-openly-available/)
and
[China](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/01/25/global-concept-local-practices-state-of-the-research-on-ocw-in-chinese/),
but none of this material uses an open license, and I would really love
if it could. On the other hand, I don't want to try to force some kind
of a North-American copyright system on these countries. I tried
repeatedly to discuss this distinction with academics in China, but
nobody seemed very interested, which was funny.

This came up during my
[conversation](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/08/27/conversation-with-leigh-blackall/)
with Leigh Blackall today, when he asked me whether there was a culture
of sharing in China already. I replied that it was more a culture of
taking, ie. people would be happy to download movies, pirate movies, and
take "open educational resources", that didn't have an open license. But
I would argue that taking is very different from sharing. Sharing is
having the person who created the resource encourage people to take it,
and facilitate that. For me, that is one of the most important roles of
Creative Commons licenses - not the legal part.

Because as I wrote on Leigh's blog, I can't imagine ever suing anyone
for abusing my license, and I certainly don't care if people credit me
or not. But by putting a CC license on your material, you tell the
world: Yes, this is my gift to you. Take it, please, send it along,
enjoy it, have fun with it, and make some stuff yourself to share as
well. As I explained to Leigh, when I published a poetry collection with
some friends as a 16 year old, we imitated grown ups and put a big
Copyright warning on the first page - even though we made no money (nor
did we try to), and would have been extremely honored if more people
were interested in reading our book. We just hadn't thought about it -
it was the thing to do, when publishing a book.

Similar with the Super Notepad program i wrote in Visual Basic 3, I
released it as postcard-ware. It's not like I had any interest in
hoarding the source code, but I just didn't think about making it open
source, because I didn't know there was such a thing. But kids these
days do. And when I am giving talks about openness and peer-creation, I
don't talk about obscure legal stuff, I show them
[ccMixter](http://ccmixter.org), mashups, Wikipedia articles progressing
through time...

So rather than the Chinese and Indian institutions necessarily embracing
a specific kind of a copyright license (although there would be certain
advantages to that too, from my Western standpoint of someone who wants
to reuse their resources), what I most want is for them to actively
share their materials, and invite people to reuse them. Implicit in this
is to publish the material in an open format - it's very hard to
translate your textbook when it's in a PDF!

So during my talk with Leigh it struck me - perhaps we should separate
the happy symbol from the legalese, and create a new logo to put on
webpages and books, that had no legal significance at all (because as
Leigh pointed out, even Public Domain signifies that there is other
stuff that is not PD), but which simply says "I actively want to share
this material with you, and I encourage you to use it and pass it on.
Like a big flower or a sun, or something hippieish...

This is just me thinking aloud. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad
thing to have copyright - those who believe CC BY Share-Alike is the
most open license will not agree, because their share-alike is only
protected by copyright - if copyright isn't respected, Share-alike won't
be either. But it's an interesting idea, and it was a useful mental
exercise for me at least, to separate the legal functions of CC, and the
community building, or norming function, which I think iCommons, the
iSummits (RIP), ccLearn and all of Lessig's talks have done so well.

Stian

**Update**: I just came back from a nice walk, with these ideas
ruminating in my mind. I was thinking about the different between
software and cultural creations, and how that might play out differently
in licenses - especially related to my last statement that Share-alike
fans might not like to abolish copyright.

The difference is access. Richard Stallmann's initial problem with
printer drivers or what it was, wasn't about someone prohibiting him
from releasing modified copies, it was about getting access to the
source code at all... And today in developing countries, of course they
can pirate software, but they can't do anything meaningful with it -
only make verbatim copies. Whereas with culture, as long as we keep
breaking all their DRM, we have full access to anything that is
copyrighted. We can mashup their movies, write fanfic about Harry
Potter, and "liberate" toll-access academic journals...

All we need is for someone to be able to access the material. And in
fact, even a share-alike license doesn't require anyone to make material
accessible... So maybe this is the difference, which makes a GPL license
really necessary for software, to "force" people to release the source
code, but which makes a "pirate as you go" approach viable for culture?
(Although I do hate those PDFs...).

Thinking aloud again...