Re: Permaculture copyright

[Leigh Blackall]

Many thanks Geoff, this is very reassuring. And when we have finished editing and packaging, I'll be sure to update you so you know where you can find resources should you need any.

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 8:23 AM, Geoff Lawton <ge...@permaculture.org.au> wrote:

Hi Leigh

              you have no problem just go ahead.

Geoff Lawton

Managing Director

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"Personal independence depends on co-operative human society.... only what we share gives us access to all necessary possessions."

                                      Bill Mollison

                        

Geoff Lawton

ge...@permaculture.org.au

On 22/03/2008, at 7:07 PM, Leigh Blackall wrote:

Hello again Geoff,

Did this email make it to you? I will follow up with a telephone call after Easter.

Regards
Leigh

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Leigh Blackall <leighb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Geoff, I called today from Dunedin NZ and left a message on your machine.. was cut short however, but I intended to follow up with email anyway.

I work for the Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin New Zealand. We are a public training and education institute much like your TAFEs. We have recently set up a Permaculture Design course and are developing it into a face to face part time course, complimented with online study resources. We hope to build ourselves to the point of being able to offer certification, but at this stage we are an introductory course. In this our pilot course, we are using the workshops and lessons to record and produce content for online learners.

As a matter of ethical and principled preference, Otago Polytechnic uses a copyleft license known as Creative Commons Attribution. This means any resources we produce for the course are free to use and redistribute so long as attribution to the original authors is maintained. As a result, this also means that all the content we use ourselves has to have such a license because anything with restrictions would effectively prevent us from using this copyleft license over all. Naturally this limits the amount of content we ourselves can use, and sadly there is not a lot of content with such a license - but I am finding a lot of good will for it naturally. We hope that by raising awareness in the Permaculture education community, we will seed the generation of free to reuse materials for Permaculture Design education.

But here's the problem. We have heard rumour that Permaculture the word is copyright, and have even heard stories of Bill Mollison claiming ownership of the word so as to prevent its miss use in some parts of the world. While we certainly have no intention of miss using the the word and principles (we believe we are complimenting them in fact), it does concern us that someone has possibly claimed ownership of the term, and that it may happen especially if they did not share our fair share ethic :) While individuals like yourself or Bill Mollison or anyone who may lay rightful claim to the word may not have issues with us producing free educational resources for Permaculture Design, publishers may well do - so we need to find out if the name is copyright, and if so we need to seek permission to use it in this our effort.

Here is a link to our course, and in it are slowly developing rough draft resource links.

I hope you or someone you know can put us in the right direction as soon as possible so that we can progress with confidence. Happy to talk further about this at any time.

Regards
Leigh

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Leigh Blackall
+64(0)21736539
skype - leigh_blackall
SL - Leroy Goalpost
http://learnonline.wordpress.com

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--
Leigh Blackall
+64(0)21736539
skype - leigh_blackall
SL - Leroy Goalpost
http://learnonline.wordpress.com

--
--
Leigh Blackall
+64(0)21736539
skype - leigh_blackall
SL - Leroy Goalpost
http://learnonline.wordpress.com