Brains working towards machine consciousness

I suspect that the OU license is invalid as it stands because it contains contradictory terms, as identified by others in this comment stream. There are two possible ways to interpret such a license. The first is that as the license is invalid you should not use the material as you have no clear license on which to do so. The second is that you apply the "blue pencil test" to make the license reasonable - and do so in favour of the non-issuing party. In this case the bit about the OU being able to revoke anything is the obvious bit to strike out. of course, the blue pencil test is for a contract and it's somewhat unclear in law whether licenses like this (which are non-negotiated) are indeed contracts or something else.
Given the confusion, though, I agree that it's probably too much hassle to bother with any of their materials, and I'd go for MIT's Open Courseware material instead (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm).

Now on to the discussion about commercial, competition and UK HE. The original judgement on FoI which required release of the material in fact made the specious argument that as UCLan was not a commercial organisation then its internal material could not be covered by the commercial exemption of FoI. I believe this to be an erroneous interpretation of the intent of the FoI. It's an interpretation which could be regarded as consistent in that it would mean that the only material covered by the commercial interest FoI exemption would be that which was provided by an external commercial partner but held by the FoI-bound institution. I actually feel that it was rather stupid to apply FoI in general to universities since the point of FoI was to change the culture of secrecy endemic to the civil service and some related public organisations like the police, to all their activities. Universities do not really fall under this since their main business is the production and dissemination of knowledge and there are other mechanisms already in place to encourage appropriate disclosure of material. The FoI in general is actually, to my mind, a quite poor piece of legislation in that it rtries to do too much with far too sweeping a hand to which a very complex set of exemptions is then applied. It would have been much better to define exactly the types of activity and information that a smaller number of bodies are expected to provide, possibly defined in secondary legislation, and then work on expanding the type of organisation and the type of information to be made available over time rather than a big bang which created uncertainty.
But, on to HE and commerce. Just because there is limited competition in the UK HE system, does not mean that it isn't a commercial activity. Universities receive payment (partly from the government and partly from the student) for provision of a service. It is completely different from the NHS, local authorities or the police (agencies also covered by the FoI) who are statutorily obliged by law to provide their services. Universities are independent non-profit bodies created by Royal Charter (ignoring the University of Buckinghamshire and a few recent strange for-profit organisations granted degree-awarding powers in the UK). They are not bound by statute to provide specific services. Where they do provide services, some of the ways in which thosee services are provided may be constrained by statue (such as in non-discriminatory admission procedures or even positive-discrimination procedures) but that's no different from many for-profit organisations who are bound by law not to discriminate on grounds of race, for example, in either hiring staff or offering their service. So, the fact that universities are paid to provide a specific service as independent institutions with no legal requirement to provide specific services (unlike NHS Foundation Trusts which are supposedly now independent but have statutory obligations to provide cerrtain types of services). To my mind this means that the commercial exemption from FoI is a reasonable one for Universities to claim covers both their course materials and their research materials. FoI should, IMHO, only apply to a limited few elements of University information, principally those concerned with how it conducts its affairs in the spending of public money or in pursuit of things like non-discrimination (SENDA, Race Relations etc). Research and teaching materials should have been exempt and probably weren't even considered at the parliamentary stage since univerrsities were a late addition to the set of instutitions covered and principally because they receive public money for which they must account (rules on payments of expenses for example, to pick a politically controversial example).

Now, as to whether universities should be open or closed in their attitude to their course material, and what the professional ethics for academics should be about this, that's a whole different can of worms that I'm thinking hard about. I have a developing idea for a book called "The Open Versus Closed debate" about attitudes to open-ness in various fields. It also ties in to issues of the purpose of educational establishments in a wired world, both in terms of no longer just the provision of access to information being sufficient to justify their existence (historically the expense of maintaining the University library was an argument for having a limtied number of institutions and for giving them certain privileged positions within society - in the days of the web the mere collection of and provision of access to information is not the issues). We've moved on in many ways to being arbiters ot quality of student work but that I under severe threat due to ubiquitous communications access, since it's already possible, and will become easier and easier, to access the internet from almost everywhere and this includes both access to statis information and communication with other individuals. Hence, closed book exams which assume the person doing the exam is actually more than a scripter for someone else cannot be maintained for very long. So we need to reconsider the whole ethos of what a University is for, and how its outputs should be viewed. To my mind, universities should concentrate on what can't be got from anywhere else [high quality teaching from high quality minds; high quality research from high quality researchers] and should stop wasting their time trying to be quality filters for companies demanding to know who the "best" potential employees are, nor should they be wasting their time on social engineering for students who are not interested in actually getting an education. But, there's at least one paper, probably more, sitting in those few sentences, but which I am working on.