Creative Commons & Attribution Workgroup

This group is interested in finding information about Creative Commons licensing & attribution standards and suggesting ways to the End-User Support community within Sakai about how best to attribute each other's resources and documentation.

Workgroup leads:
Trisha Gordon, psg3a@virginia.edu
Robin Hill, hill@uwyo.edu

Please read, check the page about new developments, and note that this issue is under discussion in the Teaching and Learning Group (DG: Pedagogy), in terms of the T&L Repository of online courses:

Teaching and Learning-- Intellectual Property

CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION for END-USER SUPPORT MATERIALS

Background:

Code and other technical writing have traditionally been considered to be part of the developer's assigned and paid work and therefore owned by the company or institution. But teaching materials have been considered to be the instructor's own creative efforts and therefore copyrighted by the author (as in textbooks). What is the status of materials that seem to fall between these products, such as sample courses, demos and tutorials, and educational matter by faculty and staff?

Sakai code itself is licensed under the Attribution ("by") option, to allow for, and encourage, commercial interest.

Issues:

1. Whereas the Sakai code is institutional and not subject to copyright, is its documentation, rather, individual intellectual property?
2. Is it important that authors receive recognition for this work on their campuses?
   If so, then the documentation license should be more restrictive, perhaps Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).
   "by": Because attribution is necessary, on all options, and desirable, for professional credit.
   "sa": Share-alike, to preserve the open-source status.
   "nc": Non-commercial, to disallow the sale of derivative works.
3. Would the "by-nc-sa" license discourage or close off consultants' participation and contribution of their documentation, which may have been derived from other materials provided by institutional staff?
4. Should sample courses be treated differently from written help documents and manuals? If so, then perhaps Attribution ("by") is the proper license for sample courses, which would align those courses with the Sakai code.