This paper was presented at the OpenEd 2010 Conference Barcelona: Proposing a "Consent Commons" in open education.
A new "Consent Commons" licensing framework is proposed complementing Creative Commons to clarify the permissions given for using and reusing clinical and non-clinical digital recordings of people (patients and non-patients) for educational purposes. Consent Commons is a sophisticated expression of ethically based "digital professionalism" which recognises the rights of patients carers their families teachers clinicians students and members of the public to have some say in how their digital recordings are used (including refusing or withdrawing their consent) and is necessary in order to ensure the long term sustainability of teaching materials including Open Educational Resources (OER). Consent Commons can ameliorate uncertainty about the status of educational resources depicting people and protect institutions from legal risk by developing robust and sophisticated policies and promoting best practice in managing their information.
