geekroom

I figure it’s necessary to start a Berkman blog with the above story title.

We’re trying to launch the latest version of H2O. This version will include for the first time basic learning content management features (a fancy way of saying that it allows project leaders to upload content into their projects and organize the content into topics). One of the many purposes of the H2O project is to promote the availability of free educational materal, so we’d like to offer project leaders the option of attaching a Creative Commons (CC) license to any given piece of content uploaded to the system. Unfortunately, there are legal issues in allowing users to represent what the license of a piece of content is. If someone uploads some content that he doesn’t own and claims that it is CC, we might get in trouble when someone else redistributes that content. So we might have to take out the CC licensing option and just remain in the constrictive world of traditional copyright, even for those folks who’d like to share what they are producing.

This possibility kills the engineer in me. We’ve already written the code, it’s code that serves a clear public good, but our crappy broken copyright laws could prevent us even from putting up a service that allows folks to exchange educational material freely. Fortunately, I work at the Berkman Center, where smart lawyers who believe in doing the right thing abound, so it’s likely we’ll figure out how to make this happen. But if it’s a struggle to make it happen at the Berkman Center, it’s not likely to happen much elsewhere.