Get Up To Speed with OER

For years, Audacity was THE Open Source sound editing software. It was both full-featured and simple to use. It was licensed under a GNU public license, which is Open Source, the software cousin of Open Educational Resources. It was free for commercial use too, just like an OER with a Creative Commons license that did not have the Non-commercial stipulation. A company called Muse acquired it. 

Muse made some changes.

• They changed the privacy policy in alarming ways, announcing that they would share user data with potential buyers of the company, the government of Russia (Muse is a Russian company,) law enforcement and court systems of any country that asked, and their "external legal counsel" in the United States.
• They changed the software itself to collect more data about the user, including their IP address. Why is this a problem?
  • A user's IP address can be used to pinpoint their geographical location and turn off access or features to certain individuals or certain countries.
  • Since IP addresses are being stored, however temporarily or securely, if there is a security breach, they become available to hackers.
  • This violates the GNU public license! 

As you have seen on a previous page of this chapter, Audacity's Open Source nature meant that the community of coders devoted to creating and maintaining it were able to create "forks," which are alternative versions. One is Tenacity, and one is DarkAudacity. They do not have the telemetry/spyware code of the official, now Muse-owned Audacity. 

I bring this up not just so you can be sure to use actual Open Source software instead of an oppressive copycat, but so that you consider this kind of situation when you decide what Creative Commons license you want to apply to your OER. On the one hand, a Creative Commons license that doesn't exclude commercial licenses is more Open. On the other, a Creative Commons Noncommercial license is the only way to prevent bad faith commercial actors from exploiting your content and possibly even transforming it into something harmful. Perhaps what Muse did is contrary to the GNU public license. But you have to consider that enforcement of license depends on courts, which are often pro-corporation, and on having enough money to take it to court, when corporations can afford expensive lawyers who specialize in intellectual property exploitation. It is much easier to defend your copyright against someone who did not have permission to use your content than it is to argue that someone who did have permission to use your content misused it.

It will always be up to you as a creator to decide whether or not to use a CC NC license. But don't let anyone who is confused by the licenses discourage you by saying that CC NC is too limiting for you.

• You, the copyright owner, still retain the right to profit from your own work even if it is under a CC NC license. You also retain the right to license specific other entities to do commercial things with it, entirely separate from the Creative Commons license.
• SUNY Empire, despite being a money-making organization, is not-for-profit, and can make use of works under a CC NC license. We couldn't use it for marketing, but that's about it.
• If somebody wanted to create something with a CC NC license and take money to recoup the cost, that would be valid.
• The only thing that would not be allowed is a for-profit entity using the CC NC content to assist in its profit-making endeavors!