Archives: January, 2010

Anyone who knows us knows LEARN NC is all about the sharing. We get requests regularly from people interested in buying our content or licensing our resources and our answer is the same… no. We won’t sell it but you can have it if you give us credit and don’t sell it, rather share what you make, too. Open source, Creative Commons, free, sharable… these are our core principles and these words are heard daily in our office.

The question is, does it make sense to share content openly, or is this trend toward open content thwarting innovation, disrespecting intellectual property and robbing us of our ability to earn a living in the long run?

In this excerpt from his upcoming book, Jason Lanier takes on intellectual sharing and digital collectivism. Strongly stated stuff, but it makes you think (or in my case, rethink) about things you have accepted (if you are like me, a priori, perhaps) as truth.

Long term trends and effect aside, how does this relate to the work of LEARN NC? I think that those of us working to meet the needs of the public school teachers and students have to share. We are working for the state, supported by public resources, and serving a constituency that is under-resourced and hardly equipped to pay. Like others in the public education arena, we are expected to play nice with others and share our toys and we actually walk the walk. Besides, once we begin to try to restrict access to those who have paid, we create a market where there isn’t one, and fair use cedes to for-profit. (takes me back to one of my very first posts in this blog almost two years ago, Fair Use: use it or lose it!)

So what do you think?