Organizer: Christopher Kelty, Anthropology Department, Rice University

The Connexions Open Content Licensing Workshop will be hosted by Rice University and the Connexions Project. It will address the increasingly urgent issues surrounding the legal status of teaching materials in networked and on-line settings. The experience and success of the solutions offered by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative have been our guide in organizing this workshop, and we plan to extend the insights of this experience to educational content, teachning materials, textbooks in projects such as the Connexions Project here at Rice.

Participating in this workshop are two members of the recently formed non-profit organization Creative Commons, James Boyle (Duke University Law School) and Glenn Brown (Executive Director, Creative Commons). Also presenting is Lawrence Rosen, legal advisor to the Open Source Initiative and long-time participant in open source software issues. Sunday afternoon presentations will give some background and overview to the issues of the Workshop, while Monday morning will be devoted to scenarios and questions specific to educational content, to XML-based markup of content, and to emerging technologies such as Digital Rights Management.

Faculty, Staff, Students or community members interested in these issues are encouraged to attend. Please RSVP elvena@rice.edu 

• The Connexions Project
• Creative Commons
• The Open Source Initiative
• Free Software Foundation

Some suggested topics:

• Technical issues concerning XML/RDF and Educational Content. The CNXml specification
• Embedding Licenses as XML Metadata
• Free Content licenses, "machine readable" licenses and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)
• Derived Works in the educational arena: authorship vs. ownership. Collaboration and credit.
• Alowable modifications, translations, updates, etc. and the right to disavow authorship.
• Issues surrounding Commercial Use of Educational Material. Textbook and On-demand publishing, etc.
• Non Commercial distribution and fair use issues.