Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This document is currently being edited (mostly for grammar) by the community, so it can be difficult to read. It essentially identifies a set of principles for standard rights statements, and lists a set of possible descriptions of rights. This is a particularly complex exercise because of the variability of local copyright laws and the complex state of the copyright any given artifact might find itself in. As usual, there are omissions (no mention at all of moral rights) and the prejudices of the authors are apparent in the language (the double-negative of "non-commercial use only" as opposed to "commercial use allowed", for example).

Mostly, though, there is a conceptual muddle here between the work's copyright status and the uses allowed of the work (where by 'uses' they actually mean a fairly narrow spectrum of republication or redistribution as "international aggregators of cultural heritage works"). On the one hand the document omits any description of fair use provisions because this "is not descriptive of copyright status but of the rationale for use," but on the other hand it includes licensing provisions such as 'educational' or 'non-commercial', even though these are also frequently aspects of fair use. This conceptual confusion becomes especially clear when trying to account for public domain artifacts, which are not owned, yet (somehow) have restrictions on use.

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

Copyright 2024
Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 10:12 a.m.

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