Page:A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement.pdf/18

 Creative Commons is a companion to the OER initiative and was founded in 2001 to help revive the shrinking public domain as copyright durations were repeatedly extended in large part due to the pressures from the media industry. They use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, their ends are cooperative and community-minded, but the means are voluntary and libertarian.

Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU General Public License, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software but for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. The aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to the material cheaper and easier. To this end, they have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. A goal is to enable people to use search and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free provided the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever.

As of June 2006 about 140 million web pages link to a CC license, according to Google, and there are over 25 million CC-licensed photographs on Flickr as of December 2006. Creative Commons licenses are the basis for numerous open resource repositories such as Science Commons and Public Library of Science. The MIT OCW has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share-Alike (By-NC-SA) license. All of this is fundamental infrastructure for the OER movement and thus Hewlett has quite wisely lent sustaining financial support to Creative Commons.

Similarly Hewlett has helped support the Internet Archives. It is another critical component of infrastructure for the OER movement, as it offers researchers, historians, and scholars permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Fortunately, such institutions are growing in number and sophistication, but Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archives has been a pioneer in this area. The Internet Archives is now creating a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. It provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.