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Creative Commons is facilitating the use and reuse of educational materials. According to this post written by a policy coordinator at the nonprofit organization, it can potentially allow students to save money they would be spending on textbooks. A professor at the University of MIchigan published a $10 book in 11 days because he adapted a book "offered under an open content license"

The use of Creative Commons licenses to broaden access to educational materials represents a general shift in academia. Although universities have often controlled this access to knowledge, these open source resources allow most people to educate themselves without the high barriers to entry, such as tuition. Like the MIT Open CourseWare, "iTunes U" compiles lectures from various universities. NYU actually just sent out its IT newsletter e-mail today, which contained a notice about its Open Education Pilot program. http://www.nyu.edu/its/connect/w11/openedpilot.html Even though it seems like universities are open to sharing lecture materials and other educational resources under the Creative Commons license, how lenient do you think these schools will be? Would they truly offer alternative textbooks in which the college has to forfeit their profit from their bookstore, for example?

Rebuttal of Turow's op ed, referenced in Andrea's blog post last week.

It appears that even professors often overlook the legality of distributing copyrighted materials. Although it's no question that fair use applies to a small excerpt or one chapter of a book, the legality of distributing multiple chapters or an entire work is, what this article calls, "cheating a legitimate economic interest." Students might disagree based on the cost of textbooks and course readers, though from the standpoint of the publisher and author, if an academic intends to use an entire work, it should not be copied, but purchased as the entire original work.