Until the end of this year, our license at FWK was CC-BY-NC-SA with an open access version (Web). Here’s a video explaining our license and why we chose it. With these considerations listed above, there are a few gray areas in the way we deploy our license.
The NC Clause. The “open purists” have always hated that we use the NC clause, because it limits certain use (They would object to all uses of the NC clause, not just ours). The main reason is not because they hate people profiting from their work, but just that the more restricted it is, the harder to mix with other, more open content. While I don’t agree that this is a gray area, it’s a real issue for the purists.
Tech barriers. Under our license, instructors can legally take our PDFs and distribute them. Or do what David Wiley did with his project management course—scrape our content, adapt, and republish. In both cases, they just have to abide by the limitations of our license. What the “open purists” knock us for is that we don’t make that operation easy. Creative Commons is very clear in their documentation that they agree with that statement.
CC licenses contain language prohibiting licensees from the use of technological protection measures to prevent access to works: “You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.”
Source: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions
Selective licensing. Can you offer your content under different licenses to different users? We hadn’t executed this yet at FWK, but we were considering separate licenses for each user:
- CC-BY-NC-SA for instructors, in our Web platform.
- ARR for students, in any output (Print, PDF, ePub, Mobi, etc.).
That way, instructors could personalize the content to their satisfaction, and the license would allow them to do that. Then the resulting derivative would be protected from free sharing and distribution. In the move away from “Free to Fair,” this protection would likely be necessary.
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