Not Quite a Blog

Last Summer, I wanted to slap a Creative Commons license on my dissertation. A good friend, Ping, had used another license (GFDL) by simply changing the copyright page and including the legal terms of the license in an appendix. So, I slapped a note on my copyright page and then included the full terms of CC's Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License in Appendix F.

Then I forgot about it... as the last bits of my thesis fell into place and some other things fell out of place.

About a week before I wanted to file, I was contacted by staff at Berkeley and told that my copyright page wasn't up to snuff. I figured that they had me nailed as some sort of rabble-rouser and that this could quickly blow up into a legal licensing mess. I was concerned that I didn't want to delay filing my thesis, but I also knew that I was probably the best person to fight this particular fight. Sigh. However, when I talked to the Berkeley staffer, it was clear that they simply expected the copyright page to look a specific way. Mine didn't look right. The rub was this: I couldn't make my copyright page "conform" without using the phrase "All Rights Reserved". Sigh.

We settled, via a formal appeal to the Graduate Division Dean, on a simple solution that you can see in my thesis: the copyright page says "Some Rights Reserved" and there is a reference to the full legal license in Appendix F. Hurray!

However, it became clear that other students might want to do this too. When danah went to file her dissertation, even though she followed the same scheme as me, the staff hadn't heard of the above exception. With a few mad text messages back and forth, I was able to give danah the name of the staffer I had worked with. This blessed staffer cleared everything up for danah. After that, hers was (probably) the second Berkeley PhD dissertation filed under a CC license. (I'd love to know of others!)

I decided to write a letter to the Graduate Division Dean asking his help to ensure that in the future using CC licenses wasn't difficult.

As reported yesterday in an op-ed, "Copyright and Copyleft in Publications", in the Daily Californian by Ian Elwood, Dean Szeri responded encouragingly a week later:

Two recent Berkeley students to file their dissertations using a Creative Commons license are Joseph Lorenzo Hall and danah boyd. Hall navigated through much bureaucratic red tape, but found that most of his difficulty came from simple formatting issues, not any ideological disagreement by the univerisyt [sic]. Another School of Information graduate, danah boyd, also filed her dissertation under Creative Commons shortly thereafter.

On Jan. 28, the Dean of the Graduate Division committed to make Creative Commons licensing available to future students. All students interested in contributing to the effort to make education more affordable and accessible should consider using Creative Commons instead of traditional copyright.

A couple quibbles: Dean Szeri didn't "commit" to making CC licenses available. In essence the exception I sought to use a CC license was the key event that will allow others to do this in the future. In his response to my letter, Dean Szeri said that my letter was timely because his staff was reviewing this and other options. As I outlined in my letter, what I would like to see happen is that students know that CC licensing is an option and know how to apply this kind of license in an informed way that doesn't run afoul of any formatting rules, let alone legal restrictions.

Also, CC uses copyright to do what it does... so maybe that last sentence would have been better as "...should consider using Creative Commons licenses instead of blindly reserving all rights."