I moderated your comment, and will delete it if you like, but I think a lot of what you suggest is important and I would love to re-post it–let me know. And I really didn’t mean to suggest that UMW Blogs refuse Creative Commons or other kinds of licensing. What I was focusing on is that universities have been rather flaccid when it comes to pushing the interpretation of Fair Use, almost unilaterally falling on the conservative end of this spectrum to remain clear of the legal thicket such usage represents. UMW Blogs allows people to license their own work, their is no umbrella clause for using or not using Creative Commons, as with everything we do this is left up to the user —we just promote and talk about the possible benefits and drawbacks. And while I am not trying to pretend we are objective, I do think that UMW Blogs as a model embodies an openness of discussion and sharing that cannot really be captured in Open Courseware. It is about people sharing their work in a very de-centered and open way, by their own volition. It is insanely sustainable, and costs us nothing. The idea of getting it out there is lion’s share of the problem, the question of licensing is important but not nearly as vital to the educational problem. We have all had to resort to the legality of learning and the necessary supplication to copyright, rather than focusing on sharing ideas freely. This to me is why the idea of a publishing platform that is open, cheap, and flexible is just as important as questions about licensing and the “rules” surrounding open content. Making it easy for people to publish their work online and engage in a distributed discourse is key to them even (re)considering questions of licensing. Moreover, if we live by the letter of the law we will also die by it, and the fact that we have to re-imagine the possibilities of openness and its real limitations within the current draconian state of copyright and intellectual property puts the open content at an imediate and immense disadvantage, how can we openly discuss our culture with being cnesored and secsured? Fair Use is as much about freedom of speech as it is about Open Content, th ability to engage the culture we inhabit openly is essential to free and just society, and I think that is what is at stake. Creative Commons answer a huge question in this regard by allowing people to license their own work, but the fact that much of the cultural production is still outside of the individual’s hands opens up a huge space for thinking about and grappling with Fair Use in educational settings.

@Scott,

Exactly, CC is key but it has dominated the conversation around copyright to such a degree that question of Fair Use have been downplayed and avoided to a potentially dangerous point. The very idea that it is illegal to interact with and re-purpose the very materials that frame a given culture openly for educational purposes suggests the extremes to which copyright has controlled the conversation, and in many ways is in the business of cultural hegemony both at home and abroad. The dictates of any given law to suppress discussion about a medium within that medium is oppression, and the fact that so many of us have internalized this process and police ourselves to the nth degree (not feeling comfortable unless we have gotten permission and attribution) highlights the dangers of making licensing the preeminent discussion of copyright in education. People should be free to interact an openly publish the products of their cultural moment in order to engage in a discussion beyond that controlled by the purveyors of culture. And this equation may change i the future, and the questions surrounding who owns what, and who controls re-use may change in 50 years if and when much of our culture has been licensed for attribution, but until (or if) this happens their are still enormous pieces of our culture that are off-limits for contextualized reproduction to foster critique, analysis, and questioning—all of which remain a the heart of educational institutions, or at least good ones