I have been trying to immerse myself in the world of OER and how Creative Commons licensing works. At the first read through and a couple of videos, I thought I had it cased. If we want to take our intellectual and creative property and allow others to use it freely with little or no restrictions, we can find a type of licensing under Creative Commons. While I found this to be a really good idea as I am always looking for “free stuff” on the internet, I wondered where things could go wrong. After many years, I have become something of a cynic, or at least, a lot less altruistic. It would seem to me that if there is all this free content out there with author permission to go ahead and use, copy, remix, edit, and build upon, then someone is likely to try and make a buck on it. So, I did the logical thing – I searched for how Creative Commons can be bad.
It appeared that there were not many matches to my query as most responses dealt with how good CC was or how to use it properly. But then I noticed that some authors using CC licensing were upset that large corporations might be making money off their work and not breaking the parameters of the license. See this article about Yahoo and Flickr. It seems that perhaps not everything is so easy to understand when it comes to CC licensing. Or at least, it would appear that, as usual, some folks do not read the fine print before they click on, “I Agree”. This article in “the scholarly kitchen”, by David Crotty explains why it is important to know what you are getting into when delving into CC licenses.
AT the end of the day, I think that I am somewhat justified in my cynicism in that, if there is a way to make a buck, someone will do it. We just have to decide if it is ok if they use our published creativity to do so. So, should we be concerned with defining something like “respectful use” in the world of ‘free online stuff’?