Is Anyone Using Technology to Denote Licensure in Content/Learning Experiences?

[Stevie Rocco]

Is anyone using technologies such as RDF, microformats, or others to denote whether something they developed/used was creative-commons or copyrighted? I'm wondering how it might be feasible to do this for distance education content such that others can "find" the CC items while allowing an institution to easily share only the portions that are not copyright-protected.

[cecem]

It seems like some of the OER projects I've looked at either ask you to agree up front to a particular license for the content as a whole or they give an author a choice for how they would like to sharing the content as a whole. Some projects also makes decisions about how to license different parts of their content (comments vs. content - esp. merlot) - but don't do this technically.

Connexions - http://cnx.org/help/ipfaq ; part of the metadata - assumption is CC Attribution, see this page as an example - http://cnx.org/content/col10218/latest/ - the license is embedded in the source code for the page as a footer

Merlot - http://taste.merlot.org/acceptableuserpolicy.html (here's a video presentation about this - http://www.screencast.com/t/8Mv2QWuded) - can declare which creative commons license you'd like to use and then they embed on the page for the resource (it seems like people may not be doing this all the time). Do some restrictions of content based on whether a group is a member or not.

OER Commons - http://www.oercommons.org/help/learn-more-about/conditions-of-use - encourages CC use but doesn't require

Teacher's Domain - http://www.teachersdomain.org/terms_of_use.html - PBS material, have a legalese version of terms vs. creative commons

[Stevie Rocco]

I was actually trying to think of ways to denote "everything but" licenses. For example, how could we mark an image that we've received permission for as "not" shareable, so that we could essentially share everything but the items tagged as non-shareable?

It occurs to me that it would give folks within institutions more flexibility that way, because licensing wouldn't be an "all or nothing" deal. RDF or something like it (an XML schema, perhaps?) would be ideal for this, I'd think. Does anyone know if anyone is doing this?

[Betsy Hutton]

I think Teachers' Domain is. To add more detail to what Cece said, specific Learning Objects within their special collection called Open Educational Resources, are categorized for permitted use with thumbnails as follows:
Download
Download and Share
Download, Share and Remix

See http://www.teachersdomain.org/exhibits/hew06-ex/index.html
I have no idea how it's done technically, but their system allows both the generator of the content and the user of the content to know at what level the media is protected or can be used. That means each component of a collection can be negotiated separately -- which is more complicated for the staff who is negotiating rights, but does lead the way to providing more "free" resources to the public.