Open Course 3
Channel: Stephen Downes
Date: 2017-09-08

A discussion of the 5 Rs of open content and how we should regard then with respect to the underlying imperative of access.

Hi Dave and George, it’s me again – still around for week three, and I welcome both of your students. Just kidding. 

Today we’re talking about the five Rs and we’re talking about creative commons. 

The five Rs , to go by your site Dave, are the rights to, and I quote: Retain, Reuse, Reuse, Remix, and Redistribute, and I’m sure there will be a lot of discussion about what each of those terms means over the course of the week so I’m not going to belabour them a whole lot, but I do want to think of the perspective that these five Rs entail, and it’s the perspective of the person who already has the document or already has the resource. 

They’re about what you can do with the resource, and to me that has always been a bit of a backwards definition of open. I know that the five Rs are derived from Richard Stallman, and are derived from the concept of free software, the concept of free as in freedom as opposed to free as in beer. 

I know that the five Rs are about creating software that can be built upon, shared, and grown by a community. All that’s fair enough. 

Even so, Stallman’s conditions talk about software with the presumption that people are going to have the software in their hands. And there’s a background understanding, background tacit agreement, if you will, sometimes not so tacit, that this software will be accessible. That it’s not going to be obfuscated, not going to be hidden behind a compiler or something like that. 

After all, the whole concept is called open source. The idea is that you’re seeing the source of the software, that it’s not hidden away from you. Apply that concept to content and the same sort of logic applies: 

The logic is that people have the need to be able to have access in order to be able to retain. 

• They need to be able to use once in order to reuse. 

• They need to be able to read and write in order to revise. 

• They need to be able to have and to hold in order to remix. And finally, 

• They need to be able to have in their hands in order to redistribute and to share. 

Without access none of these permissions works. Now you might say, and I can picture David saying in my mind, well, yeah, access is kind-of pre-supposed with these five Rs. 

I agree, it is presupposed with these five 5s, But in the  actual practice of this, in the implementation of this, access doesn’t actually necessarily happen. 

We see this the way they are instantiated in Creative Commons licenses, being the big debate- and David and I have had this debate for [laughs] literally decades- whether Open means something can be commercial or non-commercial. 

Now there can be some obfuscation about this. Do you mean, somebody might say, commercial entities? No, so let me be clear. By commercial, you don’t get access unless you give somebody money. That’s what I think of as commercial, and then we can nuance that a bit. 

Now Creative Commons licenses allow for commercial use of “open” content. The five Rs, strictly speaking, allow for commercial use, and indeed the argument is even made that it is less free if you don’t allow for commercial. I don’t think you can have on the one hand open or any of the five Rs and block access by selling. 

That’s just me, and that’s my five minutes. Talk to you next week Dave and George. 




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