(and São Paulo state) chose not to use textbooks pre-approved by the Ministry of Education under the National Textbook Plan, and has thus secured contracts with local foundations and consultants to develop textbooks adopted by the public schools under its jurisdiction. Some of the funds to develop and purchase these textbooks have come from the federal government through the National Fund for Education Development.56 Those initial contacts, which have also involved ongoing discussions of how to change textbook development,57 opened the door to interaction on how the city manages the intellectual property it receives under those contracts for textbook production. Unlike at the federal level, the city has retained the copyright of works for which it has paid, which has facilitated implementation of an open copyright governance regime favourable to OER. The OER-Brazil Project and the Creative Commons Brazil team worked with the municipality of São Paulo to start the process of openly licensing all of the educational resources to which they already had the rights. They did this by working with the municipality’s public lawyers to define what steps would be necessary to regularize internal licensing or assignment contracts and which works could be directly openly licensed. This work was completed through meetings and preparation of written legal opinions. Alexandre Schneider, the Education Secretariat, noted that “we didn’t have an appropriate way to license our content … We hold the rights to our content because we created it, and we realised it would be right to release it under a license that allows everyone to use and adapt what was created with public money” (Mandelli, 2011). The resources that have been openly licensed are textbooks and pedagogical and educational material focusing on K–12 education, adult education, special education for people with disabilities, use of technology, education focussed on racial issues, toolkits and brochures with didactic orientation and directives, and materials setting teaching methodologies and curricula, as well as resources produced under the programme Ler e Escrever (“Read and Write”). To implement and regulate this action, the city promulgated Decree 52681/2011,58 establishing that all of the works listed above, when developed or paid for by the city, will be licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Currently, the OERBrazil Project and Creative Commons Brazil are assisting the city to implement this decree and to define what, for the city, is meant by a “noncommercial” restriction.59 The OER-Brazil Project also started discussion on a technology strategy to improve archiving, distribution and collaboration on OER, since the city has indicated that it wants to provide an online platform in which people can collaborate, improve, remix and adapt the open textbooks provided by the municipality. Both the Mayor and the Education Secretariat, with whom the OER-Brazil Project has liaised in developing and implementing an OER policy and technological strategy, are from Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira,60 the traditional opposition to the Working Party (PT). This attracted criticism from some people within the open community, particularly those with affiliations or loyalties to PT, but the decree represents an important achievement in a cause that is and should be non-partisan.
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