Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The OEO Logo and CC

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Feb 26, 2012

UNESCO recently launched a new OER logo.



On 25/02/2012 9:19 PM, Cable Green wrote:

UNESCO – please change the license from CC BY ND… to either CC BY … or CC BY SA… so we can all use it.


I really wonder whether this narrow interpretation is accurate and in the best interests of CC licensing generally.

With the logo as it is, I feel free to slap it on my OER contents, so long as they are OERs, pretty much no matter what CC license I use - CC-by-NC, CC-NC, whatever. Because they are all open educational resources (agitation by commercial entites to the contrary notwithstanding).

If I were a real stickler for the letter of the law (which I'm not) I would put an asterisk by the logo and ass the text at the bottom: * OER logo (cc) UNESCO CC-by-ND

What their license tells me is that (a) I can use it in this way, but (b) only if I don't replace the hands with smiley faces (or my corporate logo).

Suggesting that ND means I cannot attach it to anything seems to me to be a very narrow legalistic interpretation of ND. How can it be a derivative or of a logo to apply (without changes) it to what it is intended to designate?

Personally, I probably won't use the logo - I don't understand why it was created or what it is supposed to signify, exactly. But those who do choose to use the logo should not feel constrainted by a limitation only a lawyer could dream up. It's not a reasonable limitation, and UNESCO should not be forced to recognize such a limitation as fact.



Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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