OpenEd: Week 6 Background Readings in Copyright and the Public Domain

Understanding the importance and value of the public domain, how much (what percentage) of this value would you estimate is realized when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license? To what degree would the open educational resources movement (and therefore the world) be additionally benefited if OERs were simply placed in the public domain? Please explain.

I think taht we can only measure the percentage of these licenses seeing how many rights we get about a work because a work which is in the public domain means that it’s free for use and re-use by anyone and there aren’t any restrictions upon the use of work and nobody can get rights over it. Therefore, the percentages in CC are variable because we can configure them in many forms: Attribution, Attribution - No Derivate Works, Attribution - No Derivate Works - Non commercial, Attribution - Non commercial, Attribution - Non commercial - Share alike, Attribution - Share alike. The GDFL license is criticized because it has invariable text which doesn’t modify or remove. Both licenses have rights about works and therefore they can’t obtain the 100% of value of public domain.

In conclusion, we can see a line with two extremes, Copyright and public domain, and in my opinion about the value of the public domain using theses licenses is positive, around 80-90 % but not 100% because get rights.

The issue about the additional benefit if OERs were simply placed in public domain, I think, Whole it would be an error because movement promotes the use and reuse the resources, and all this would be infringed because anyone could make extra works that could have been created with a ‘private’ public domain, extending copyright and inhibit those who seek to build upon and reuse the works of the past.