User:Jtneill/Open licensing

Open licensing
Emancipatory teaching in an electronic age includes placing all teaching, research, and service materials on the open web and in the public domain or applying some form of copyleft license, such as the Creative Commons licenses or the GNU Free Documentation License, which qualifies as a free cultural work. See also free culture.

Basically, this allows users to copy, modify, and redistribute the material. Otherwise the sharing of the information is only partial, with inconvenient and unnecessary restrictions imposed on the reader.

Copyright law was developed to protect the public from the problem of content creators allowing limited use of information to the detriment of society. Hence, "fair use" or "fair dealing" was written into law, to protect the interests of the public, giving them some basic rights of use to published information (e.g., being allowed to copy a portion of material for study purposes).

However, for optimal human development, greater freedom and openness in knowledge-sharing is needed, ideally with no or minimal restriction upon use of material by the reader.

One of the simplest and best solutions is to put one's materials in the public domain. It all ends up in the public domain anyway once you've been dead long enough - why wait?

Modern technology has heralded the death of traditional copyright. It's time to march to a different beat, and academics should be leading the march. A minimum to be expected by society in return for the privilege of being an academic is free, open, electronic sharing of academics' teaching, research, and service work.