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@creativecommons tells us that licensing academic materials under their "no derivatives" license is misguided. As someone who's licensed a free copyright text under CC's ND license, let me tell you why I think that advice is unhelpful. 1/ https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1253290310941237253
So here's a link to my copyright text, which I've authored with my wonderful @nyulaw @NYUEngelberg colleague @JeanneFromer. http://www.copyrightbook.org/ 2/
This is a 700+-page book, intended for use in law school copyright courses. It was a lot of work to write. But we wanted people to have access to it for free, and that's why we used the CC license. 3/
That has worked out *great* for us so far. We have a ton of adoptions at schools all over the country, and even a few schools abroad. Which is so gratifying. 4/
Some of the adoptions doubtless has to do with our decision to give people the right to copy and distribute the work for free, as long as they do so for non-commercial purposes and attribute to us. But why did we decide to restrict derivatives? 5/
People outside the copyright field might find it hard to imagine, but copyright law is (weirdly) an ideological battleground, and has been for a long time. In our text we do what responsible academics do and attempt to expose students to a range of different arguments. 6/
Doing so requires careful judgment. And, speaking just for myself here and not for my co-author, that means I do not want people revising the book in ways that I don't agree with, and then failing to inform people that the revisions are not my work. 7/
Which is a legitimate worry, because CC's licenses contain an attribution requirement, so those creating derivative works would be *required* to acknowledge me, and not required to distinguish my work from theirs. 8/
And even if they tried to do that, there's no guarantee that readers would understand the distinctions. 9/
This is why we decided to use the ND license. To protect ourselves against being misunderstood in a field where some people seem bent on misunderstanding, and others might misunderstand in good faith. 10/
Now, just to be clear, we are entirely willing to permit most derivatives, and we say so on the book's website. So anyone who wants to make a derivative can ask; so long as it's not likely to cause the kind of misunderstanding we're concerned about, we are likely to say yes. 11/
We've invited people to do that, and made it easy to get ahold of us. So, I don't think the ND license is doing any significant harm. Its a bit weird that CC would be casting shade on their own license, but that's a separate issue. There's another weird thing ... 12/
... And that's CC's suggestion that attribution requirement is somehow going to take care of the risk of misrepresentation. In my experience, the creators of derivatives under CC licenses often provide little or no guidance re what they've changed, or links back to originals. 13/
And even if they did, is that useful in my case? Are readers going to plow through a 700+-page book to parse what Jeanne and I wrote and what we did not write? No, they aren't. 14/
So, I think the idea that sharing academic materials under an ND license is "misguided" in all cases is itself misguided. I like and respect CC, but this post smacks of open access puritanism and really misses the mark. /end
