One often repeated aim for educational technology projects is the aim to enable teachers and trainers to reuse existing material and to “remix” it with other educational resources. This target seems to be quite easy to solve on a first sight but the problems occur when we look at how much detail about licensing one must know before s/he can make an informed decision what resources can be remixed. One the one hand creativecommons have an enormous impact on a kind of “personalized” licensing between public domain and traditional intellectual property rights. On the other hand this freedom in licensing brings so much complexity into the authoring process that it is not easy to choose appropriate educational resources for reuse and remix. Take a look at the following picture:

CCcomp

This picture shows the many possible combination of material with a cc-license and the ability to remix this material (see a live combination wizard here) . Maybe intelligent technological solutions like a license specific search and retrieval of material helps to reduce complexity. But maybe the solution to this problem is much easier: Just do not choose a very restrictive license for your own material.