License Compatibility

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License Compatibility
One of the distinguishing characteristics of OERs is that they have a clear license/terms of use describing how a user can use the materials.

(Note: 'How materials with different licenses can be used together is outside the scope of this meeting (the lawyers and intellectual property specialists have to figure it out). However, there are a number of enablers and recommendations that we can develop within the scope of this meeting.)

Examples:
 * Creative Commons License Compatibility Wizard
 * GNU Various Licenses and Comments about Them (same as Free Software Foundation Licenses
 * Example of Teachers' Domain "level 2" license and deed

Challenges:
 * Restrictions and differing restrictions on use between different licenses. For example, Teachers' Domain is unable as yet to use CC licenses because of their lack of a clear restriction for "educational" uses, a requirement of many of the sublicensees of media elements.
 * Developing a large body of content with the least restrictive licenses so that reuse possibilities are maximized.
 * MIT OCW has received feedback from users that sites using different licenses on the same site can be extremely confusing. OER sites should strive to be consistent with their licenses "site wide".  For the users, we need to keep it simple.

Enablers:
 * Easy end user access to attribution/citation information for the resource, machine and human readable licenses attached to and/or embedded in the resource
 * Upcoming compatibility/relicensing between Gnu FDL (Wikipedia content) and CC BY-SA, more at: http://lessig.org/blog/2007/12/some_important_news_from_wikip.html