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Licensing and Source Materials

The mission of FCC is to support free curricula. The two definitions for the word free that apply are "unencumbered" and "costless".

Unencumbered, or free in the sense of academic freedom, means that anyone is welcome to take an FCC curriculum and modify it to suit his or her needs. Our goal is to work together to light a fire of knowledge that spreads as quickly as possible throughout the world.

Costless, or free in the sense of not having to pay money, means that there is no charge to download curricula from the FCC web site. Text documents, like textbooks and instructor guides, are available in RTF and PDF format to any who wish to obtain them. Audio/visual presentations are similarly released in an accessible format with a free player, such as QuickTime.

The most free that a work can be is if it is released into the public domain. In this case, the work is completely free of copyright, and no rights have been reserved. The work may be used, copied, downloaded, modified and sold as its readers see fit. It is irrevocable to place a work into the public domain, so those who do so may be comforted that it may not be copyrighted by anyone else. It is FCC's preference to release works into the public domain.

Not all FCC participants may be willing to release their work completely in this fashion, however. There are a number of licenses that can be applied to a curriculum or other document to provide wide ranging freedoms to its readers and other users. These licenses are collectively known as "copyleft". When a committee is organized to start a new project, its Chair selects an appropriate license under which the project's output will be released. Options include:

However licensed, a project will include textbook chapters and related instructor guide materials. It may also include a series of audio-video lectures or other multimedia materials.

Suggestions for Source Materials

Although the task of drafting a set of textbook chapters sufficient for an entire course, much less an entire undergraduate program, may seem daunting, it is not necessarily required to do so starting from an entirely blank slate. There are a number of sources for material which may be incorporated into the curriculum with varying degrees of revision:

  1. Documents the author of which is the United States Government are by default in the public domain. The volume of output of the American government is truly staggering and thus can include a great deal of potentially useful material.
  2. Similarly, documents produced by most Commonwealth countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and others, are under Crown Copyright, which allows use without payment, requiring only attribution.
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made a serious commitment to copylefted curricula with their Open Courseware project. While they do not produce textbooks, they do release lecture notes from many courses, and in many cases these notes are quite extensive. MIT releases its material under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which requires attribution, prohibits commercial use, and allows derivative works if the same license is applies to them.
  4. The Connexions project of Rice University is a large set of educational bits and pieces that are designed to be put together as best fits the education situation. Its material is released under a license that requires only attribution.
  5. Textbooks written and published before January 1, 1923, and in some cases those written as recently as the mid-1970's, are in the public domain in the United States by virtue of their copyright having expired. For some subjects a textbook several decades old would be nothing more than a curious throwback, but for others, such as literature or undergraduate level mathematics, the material has seen few or no changes.