Open educational resource
community LeMill —
Copyright Issues
Hans Põldoja
Tallinn University

What is LeMill?
• Web community for finding, authoring and sharing
open and free learning resources: http://lemill.net
• 2153 teachers and learning content creators from
40 countries, 1125 learning resources, 206
methods and 387 tools
• Open source server software developed in EU 6FP
project CALIBRATE

http://lemill.net

http://lemill.net

http://lemill.net

http://lemill.net

Simple licensing scheme
• All resources created in LeMill are published under
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
license
• Media pieces can be also under:
- Creative Commons Attribution license
- GNU Free Documentation License
- Public Domain
• References to external content under any license

Reusing open content
6 900 000
BY
2 500 000 5000
4 900 000
media files content modules
BY-SA
photos

Embedding copyrighted content

Why BY-SA?
• Open is not enough, educational resources should
be free to use in any context
• Reasons not to use Noncommercial restriction:
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
• ShareAlike resriction protects authors

Problems
• Other Estonian initiatives do not guide people to
use BY-SA license
• Teachers remix CC licenses that can not be
remixed
• Teachers upload copyrighted content

Approximate distribution of
copyleft licenses for content
26%
Attribution–Noncommercial–ShareAlike
48% Attribution–ShareAlike
GNU Free Documentation License
26%
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/355

Future plans
• Better tools for copyright management
• Upgrading to BY-SA 3.0
• Double licensing: BY-SA + GNU FDL
• Meet the requirements for Free Cultural Works

Requirements for Free
Cultural Works
• Availability of source data
• Use of a free format
• No technical restrictions
• No other restrictions or limitations
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition

Thank you!
• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
• Skype: hanspoldoja
• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja/