Open Content

Research questions under editing, so kinda of messy :-)

1. What is Open Content?

Open content, coined by analogy with "open source" (though technically it is actually share-alike with no non commercial prohibition), describes any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the information. Content can be either in the public domain or under a license like the GNU Free Documentation License. "Open content" is also sometimes used to describe content that can be modified by anyone; there is no closed group, like a commercial encyclopedia publisher, responsible for all the editing.

2. Can you give some examples of Open Content?

• MIT OpenCourseWare
  

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from MIT's undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the year 2007.It can be considered as a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The intiative was launched in 2001.

As of August 2005, 1435 courses are available online. While a few of these are limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provide homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations in Java or Matlab, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and even streaming video lectures.

Copyright in OCW material remains with MIT or members of its faculty.

• Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an Internet connection. The project began on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written (and now defunct) Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia's slogan is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and the project is described by its co-founder Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."[2] Collective authorship and understanding is the primal belief of being involved in a collective encyclopedia or wikipedia.

There are over 200 language editions of Wikipedia, around 100 of which are active. Fourteen editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English, German, Finnish, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Norwegian.

• Flickr

Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite.Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword "tags" (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy. Also, Flickr was one of the first websites to implement tag clouds.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons attribution-based and minor content-control licenses. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

6. Concerns with the open content

2. How do we currently deal with the problems of intellectual property of open content?
3. Describe the problem of Intellectual Property of Open Content in a WEB 2.0 environment.
4. What will be a good solution for this problem?

Driving Forces

Technological

• Peer to peer file sharing, such as BitTorrent, Emule

Societal

• Sharing spirit
• Contribution: MIT open course ware

"This project is a systematic study of why and how it makes sense for commercial companies and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media to make certain materials widely available for free—and also how free services are morphing into commercial companies while retaining their peer-to-peer quality. "

• Changing of lifestyle: people spend more time on the internet
  

Economical

• Books are becoming more and more expensive

references
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr