Ahrash Bissell Interview Notes - May 12, 2009

Conducted with Carolina Rossini via e-mail; responses were received on May 12, 2009

Interviewee

Ahrash Bissell
Executive Director, ccLearn
Email: ahrash [at] creativecommons [dot] org

Questions and Answers

What importance do you attribute to copyright for business models in the textbooks publishing and educational material industries? Do you identify differences among different market segments, such as educational software or digital materials compared to textbooks?

I think that copyright is very important to these industries, but not in the way that is commonly understood or practiced. It is absolutely crucial that both authors and publishing companies be able to associate themselves with specific works, both for reputation reasons and to develop specific monetizable relationships with their clients (students, teachers, school districts, etc). There are other useful legal tools as well which are sometimes more appropriate, such as patents, but copyright nonetheless remains one of the most important legal aspects of educational production.

There are differences among market segments. In software, there is a strong and continuously growing awareness and acceptance of OSS and related principles. The benefits, in terms of cost and customization, are obvious. What is more interesting is that the growing use of OSS has also paved the way for a better understanding of (and subsequent budgeting for) the ongoing maintenance and improvement costs of any software, especially if integrated at an institutional level. In educational content, non-textbook media seem to be more amenable to open licensing models than textbooks, simply because the threshold for releasing non-textbooks is so much lower and is therefore more likely to occur with the volunteer efforts of individuals. However, in both cases, and for OSS as well, there is still a strong need for copyright, either to protect the works from competitors (analog model) or to enforce behaviors and expectations (digital commons model).

What are the interests or actors protected by copyright in these sectors?

The interests tend to fall into three areas: 1) Authors of educational content protecting themselves from others appropriating their materials; 2) Publishers using copyright as a lever to force payment and recover expenses associated with the production and adoption processes (especially in K12); or 3) Communities (which usually consist of a mix of authors and organizations) enforcing codes of conduct through the use of a public through license, such as one requiring "share-alike."

Note that in the first two cases, the protections sought for recognition are often confounded with the protections sought for business models. Copyright is not necessarily the best tool for such things, but it is often the only tool that people know about.

Are there cost structures that justify copyright and copyright enforcement?

Yes. Copyright is a critical component of any cost structure that requires payment for access. This makes perfect sense in an analog situation. There are also many types of works which can be considered "strictly creative," meaning that there is no particular reason to believe that anyone is being harmed by lack of access, so presumably only those with sufficient interest and means in acquiring the work will have any need to do so.

It is worth being clear that copyright is probably necessary regardless of the cost structure, but not to enforce a specific business model. Creators and consumers alike benefit if there is some legal protection for helping to verify authorship and authenticity of works.

Do you envision alternatives to copyright in the educational materials and textbooks sectors? If so, what are they?

I think that many organizations should actually be leveraging patents and trademarks (or certification marks). In many cases, the specific claim being made by a production company relates to the presumed quality of the products. In other words, they believe that people should be willing to pay for their works because they have put a lot of effort into ensuring that such works meet certain key criteria. To the extent that this is true, they should be able to use their trademark to protect the use of their fully-formed works without having to cut off access to the basic information.

Can you identify changes in industry that have affected this “dependency”? Are these pushing for more closed or more open business models?

I'm not sure I fully understand this question, but here is an attempt. There are many changes in education, at all levels, that are affecting the relationship between copyright and educational content. First, there is a drive towards increased standardization of assessment. Counterintuitively, I believe that this trend is actually pushing for more open business models because teachers and students must both get more creative to figure out how to take a diverse population and somehow force them to perform similarly. Second, the costs of educational materials (especially textbooks) are unreasonable and continue to rise. These costs are an enormous burden on students and society, and as such, they are pushing for more open models where the costs might be reduced or eliminated through digitization. Third, there is increasing recognition that teachers need to be empowered to bring their expertise and innovation to bear in classrooms. While teacher training remains a huge problem, we recognize that we cannot expect to retain high quality teachers unless they are given some freedom to innovate in the pursuit of better educational outcomes for their students. Fourth, there is a growing acceptance of non-formal (or home-schooled) educational systems. These forms of education have traditionally been isolated and have therefore suffered from lack of access to learning materials comparable to those in the formal educational sector. There is no logic to that division, and the erosion of these boundaries is again pushing for more open business models.

Finally, educational organizations, like all organizations that deal in information, are struggling to understand and then hopefully capitalize on the novel capacities of the web for information exchange and adaptation. While some closed models may be able to hand on for some time, it is my belief that ultimately only open models that embrace the inherent advantages of the web will prevail.

What new business models do you identify in these sectors?

As mentioned above, there is a world of opportunity around more transparent value associated with quality control and trademarks. Current processes of quality control are rife with problems and difficult to discern. The future will hopefully be dominated by consumer-empowerment in the form of visible evidence of how one product is better than others in the specific manner desired. I also think that we have to recognize that education has never been "sustainable" in a strict business sense anyway - it is understood as a public good and is funded as such. Given this fact, state and federal governments should support the infrastructure of open education - through the creation and maintenance of open content, open licensing, and open technologies - priming the system for further innovation for whomever has a good idea. I believe that most people will willingly pay for work of clear value, so there are also opportunities for subscription models, membership models, non-profit schemas, etc.

What is the role of CC licenses in supporting this new business models? How is each license more or less appropriate for different types of different business models or business concerns?

CC licenses are crucial to this developing landscape. As already mentioned, some form of protected recognition is going to be necessary if we want people to invest effort in developing interesting and useful works. Reputation systems can emerge outside of the law, but that is difficult to maintain across disciplines and cultures. Except in the case of highly remixable content (e.g., data, where no rights reserved is preferable), minimal protection for attribution is necessary.

Objectively, the only licenses that will work to build a truly global learning commons is CC BY or works in the public domain (and equivalent, such as CC Zero). Thus, we must encourage business models that adhere to this legal standard. However, until policies supporting open educational resources and practices become widespread, more limited CC licenses may be necessary in some cases for projects to survive. For example, new publishing companies cannot afford to be swamped by the still-superior marketing and adoption capacities of established media companies, so they will need to use the NC term to protect their investments. In community-generated projects, the SA term can be useful in enforcing a code of conduct that is crucial to the success and sustainability of the project.

However, too many projects apply these and the ND restrictions for the wrong reasons, usually to enforce user behaviors in highly specific ways or even to favor one type of user over another. In these cases, the more restrictive licenses are inappropriate to the intentions and should be discouraged.

Do you believe that the choice of license impacts sustainability of a resource? If so, how?

No, I do not. I think that sustainability is often confused with "integrity", and all digital objects retain their integrity (for at least the original version) regardless of the license used. As already described, there are some business models which are likely to require more restrictive licenses, but I believe that these models are less sustainable than projects that are able to operate using the most liberal CC licenses.

If copyright is still important for some, how do you see as possible the emergence of OER projects? To what urgency or necessities does the OER movement respond?

Again, I'm not sure if I completely understand the question. But I think that the implication is that copyright, per se, is somehow antagonistic to OER projects. This is not correct - there is nothing wrong with copyright as it pertains to OER. It is the specific form of copyright that matters. Creative Commons and OER are going to become the standard for education eventually, simply because these schemes work with the Internet, which rapidly dominating the information landscape. Certain projects and people may fight against this trend, but I feel that it is not a fight that they will win, nor is it a fight anyone interested in innovation or educational opportunity should want them to win.

I think the only question for the OER movement is how long they want to be in transition from the old way of doing business to the new way. Without strong advocacy, adoption of key best practices, and encouragement of business models that work with the most liberal licensing choices, we will remain in a state of transition for a long time. Alternatively, we can implement the new open educational paradigms much sooner if people can grasp the full scope of the fundamental shift that has occurred with digitization and the growth of the Internet, and then act accordingly to embrace openness. I feel that we cannot afford to wait. There are many significant global problems awaiting our combined attentions and a more deeply educated workforce - we need to enable educational access and opportunity now.

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