By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Identify the differences between the six currently available Creative Commons licenses

• Identify the conditions including attributions when using open licensed material

• Recognize how different license permissions impact remixing compatibility

• Use tools to guide you in choosing the appropriate license for your own work

• Use tools for creating attribution statements in your work

Understanding Copyright, Fair Use, & Public Domain

Copyright

Copyright is a form of legal protection automatically provided to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works. Copyright in the U.S. is automatically assigned to creators of work, with no registration necessary.

It can be unlawful to use copyrighted works of others without their permission, and no permissions are granted in the case of All Rights Reserved (ARR) works. Activities such as copying, modifying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and distributing copies of ARR work may be illegal unless permission is granted by the creator. U.S. copyright law generally gives the author/creator or owner of an original creative work an exclusive right to

• Reproduce (copy) or distribute the original work to the public (e.g., create and sell copies of a film)

• Create new works based upon the original work (e.g., make a movie based on a book)

• Perform or display the work publicly (e.g., perform a play)

Violation of one of these rights is called copyright infringement. However, the use may be authorized by copyright limitations (such as fair use) described below.

Fair Use

Start with an overview of fair use by viewing this short video:

Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. Whether or not a specific use falls under Fair Use is determined by four factors:

• the purpose and character of your use

• the nature of the copyrighted work

• the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and

• the effect of the use upon the potential market

Unfortunately, if the copyright owner disagrees with your fair use interpretation, the dispute may have to be resolved by a lawsuit or arbitration. If it’s not a fair use, then you are infringing upon the rights of the copyright owner and you may be putting yourself or the institution at risk. The only guidance for fair use is provided by a set of factors outlined in copyright law. These factors are weighed in each case to determine whether a use qualifies as a fair use.

Recognizing the differences between how copyrighted material and openly licensed or public domain material can be reused and shared legally, allows for a comprehensive understanding of the Fair Use principle.

Open License

An open educational resource is either in the public domain or released with copyright permissions which allows for free use and re-purposing by others. Specifically, an open license exists as a way for the original creator to clearly inform others how their work can be used by granting permissions to share and adapt their work. A Public Domain license and the variety of open license permissions known as Creative Commons (CC) are the predominant standards for open licenses.

Public Domain

A public domain work is a creative work that is not protected by copyright, which means it’s free for you to use without permission. Works in the public domain are those for which intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable.

Here are some examples of works in the public domain:

• Material created by the US Government, such as pictures taken by NASA

• Materials for which Copyright Protection has lapsed, such as “New Hampshire” by Robert Frost

• Works released to the public domain when they were created, such as images on Pexels

Determining if a work is in the public domain can be difficult because the terms of copyright protection in the United States have changed over time. The Cornell University Library Copyright Information Center is a useful tool for understanding what works might fall into the public domain.

Why Open Licensing Matters

The power of open licensing lies in its ability to clearly communicate how the creator intends the work to be used. A creator can explicitly share the work and control the licensing provisions while retaining ownership. Remember, for a work without a copyright notice, all rights reserved is assumed. If you want to openly share your OER with your students and faculty peers, or publish it online for the world to access, displaying an open copyright license statement with the work ensures it will be easily and clearly adopted in the way you intend.

Licensing Your Work

Don’t forget to choose a license for your work! Look at this extensive list of considerations for licensors and licensees before deciding which license to apply to your work. Use the Creative Commons license chooser as well.

Reminder:

Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license from using the work according to that license. You can stop offering your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish, but this will not affect the rights associated with any copies of your work already in circulation under a Creative Commons license. So, you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy with people being able to use your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work.

CCBY CCBYSA CCBYNC CCBYNCSA CCBYNCND

No, that wasn’t a typo! The acronyms above are representative of the six different Creative Commons (CC) licenses. In this module, you will learn about the different conditions and permissions of these licenses.

This short slide show presentation provides a brief introduction to creative commons licenses and their conditions. Review the presentation first. Then, come back to this module and continue learning.

Creative Commons, the 5Rs, and OER

Six Licenses

There are six different Creative Commons (CC) licenses that are useful combinations of conditions, all including the primary condition of Attribution. Understanding the meaning of each condition can be useful when deciding which CC license to use on your own work. As discussed in Modules 2 and 3 (Search and Evaluate), understanding the meaning of the conditions can also be useful in evaluating an open resource.

Four Creative Commons Conditions

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

All six of the Creative Commons licenses include the BY or attribution condition. This is a requirement of reuse. The original creator has explicitly informed the user of this requirement through the use of the BY condition. As you learned in the slide show presentation earlier in this module, citations and attributions are similar but different. Providing attribution is the legal requirement of the open license. While some tools, like CC Search, include the attribution in the resource, there are other tools available to help users easily create attribution statements for work they reuse, remix, or modify.

• Attribution Builder - created by Open Washington, this tool, similar to a citation generator, builds attribution statements that can be copied and pasted into documents and websites. Note: all the attribution statements for these modules were created using this tool.

• CC Attribute - ify - is a Google Add-on tool. It is easy to install as an Add-on for your docs. Attribution statements can be created within the document as you go, similar to how MS Word has a citation builder in their toolbar.

Combining the Conditions

The BY (attribution) condition is a part of all the licenses, but not all of them work together. For example, the SA and ND conditions do not appear in the same license because there is no reason to include the share-alike condition when no derivatives are being allowed. Together, the conditions form the six CC licenses:

Choosing a License for Your Work

Remember, when sharing your work, selecting and displaying a license with it ensures the work can be adopted and adapted how you want! If you don't select a license, all published material may be assumed to be all rights reserved even if you intended it to be openly licensed.

When creating work to share, carefully consider how you want your work to be used when choosing which open license to apply. As the original creator of your work, you have choices.

• Do you want to allow derivatives? (If you do not allow derivatives, it is NOT OER)

• Do you want to allow for commercial purposes?

• Do you want the same license to be applied on derivatives?

• If this work was made using openly licensed material, is there a copyright provision you must abide?

Creative Commons designed the licenses to provide more options to the creator than all-rights reserved copyright. The CC License chooser is a simple tool designed to help creators decide which license is best for their work. Remember, when remixing content to create something new, if any of your adapted content includes the SA (share alike) condition - you must apply the SA condition to your newly remixed finished work.

Visit the CC license chooser. With two questions, the tool will prompt you to select conditions for sharing your work. A license icon, statement, and code -- similar to those listed below in the attributions -- to embed is generated for you to easily copy and paste into your work.

Sharing Your Work

Are you interested in sharing your material? Do you have an engaging course activity, image, assessment item, video, or a whole course that might be beneficial to other faculty in your discipline? Sharing your work is a personal choice and can be daunting, but it also can be rewarding. Sharing your work with others allows for increased use as well as opportunities for collaboration, enhancement, and improvement of your work. You can start small by sharing your work with others in your department or just at your institution. Or, if you are ready, you can share it globally with other educators and students, thus contributing to the open education community at large.

Whether you share it locally or globally as an OER, consider the following steps as your guide to sharing your work.

Step 1: Terms of Use

Decide on the terms of use. Do you wish to release your work under Creative Commons license or in the public domain? Please make sure to review the difference between these two copyright terms:

• By releasing your work under a Creative Commons license, you retain ownership while allowing others to use your work (as long as they attribute it to you) without needing to ask permission of you directly.

• By releasing your work in the public domain, your copyright ownership is waived. It is as if you are GIVING your work to the public as a gift. Users may still cite you when adopting your work, but they are not required to do so.

Step 2: Seeking Copyright Clearance

Be sure that the work is eligible to be shared. To release your work with a CC license or in the public domain, your work should be cleared from all copyright issues. To do so, your work should be one or a combination of the following types:

1. your original work,

2. built from open resources,

3. built from the public domain,

4. built from copyrighted work that you obtained permission to use and distribute for the life of your openly licensed work, or

5. combination of above works

Note: For any third-party materials, whether openly licensed or copyrighted, those materials need to be attributed as not governed by the CC license you chose for your work, but under different terms and by different authors.

Getting Permission to Use Copyrighted Materials

If you must use any items that are copyrighted with all-rights reserved, please be sure to obtain the permission letter(s) from the author(s). Please find a sample permission request email.

A sample email to ask for permission to use the work:

Hello Dr. Lone Star,

I am a faculty member with the ____ project. The purpose of this project is to design openly licensed Science and Technology courses that can be taught face-to-face, hybrid, and/or online. These courses will be freely available on the internet for anyone to copy, modify, and use. One of the purposes of this project is to offer educational resources to regions where formal educational opportunities are scarce or expensive.

I am creating a course titled “Horticulture History of the Texas Bluebonnet” and I would like to use a post from your blog titled “Environment and Climate: Impacts On the Texas Bluebonnet ” from February 2020.

I am seeking your permission to distribute this material as part of our course. You will maintain your copyright but will be giving us permission to distribute this material for reuse as part of the teaching of this course. We will most likely copy the text of your post into a Google document and attribute you. A full citation for the work will accompany it, as will a statement of copyright ownership.

Please contact me at xxxx@bluebonnetu.edu or by telephone at 512-xxx-xxxx with information about this request. Thank you for your time and attention.

Regards,

Your name

Step 3: Selecting a Repository

For Images

Consider Flickr or Wikimedia Commons. As you upload your image to these repositories, you will see the option to select the terms of use. Open Washington has created simple instructions if you need help in uploading an image to your Flickr account and marking it with a CC license.

For Videos

Consider YouTube or Vimeo. For help, consult these instructions created by Open Washington for uploading videos in Youtube. Always provide captions to your videos. YouTube automatically creates captions; always verify that captions are correct. They can be edited easily, by following these simple instructions.

For Course Materials

Middlesex Community College asks that you upload your materials to the MCC group on OER Commons. https://www.oercommons.org/groups/middlesex-community-college/3388/

Alternatively, web storage space like Google Drive allows for easy and free access, which can be a convenient place for your students to access your OER materials. If you choose a web storage space, make sure to (1) manually mark your work as CC-licensed or the in public domain by placing the copyright notice somewhere visible and (2) make the link accessible by the public.

Concept Review

True or False:

The four Creative Commons conditions are: Attribution, Share Alike, Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives

• True

• False

When reusing any work with a creative commons license, attribution is suggested, but not required as part of the license condition.

• True

• False

Using the Attribution Builder, generate an attribution statement for the following linked image: Think! by Christian Weidinger

Activity

Go back to the OER you created in the previous section. Be sure your resource is properly marked with an open license and publicly accessible (public link sharing in Google Docs is acceptable if you’re not ready to make it broadly discoverable). If you’d like to adapt a resource that already exists, make sure to provide a link to the original version so we can see the improvements you made. HINT: TASL!

Here’s an example of an openly licensed handout on open education for faculty. It was created with a Google Docs template. The handout was adapted from an existing OER (see attribution statement) and modified to meet the needs of the creator for a faculty workshop.

• Open Education (OE): A Fact Sheet for Faculty

Once you’ve created your OER, consider emailing the resource link to your colleagues or students for review.

Attributions

Texas Learn OER by Carrie Gits for DigiTex which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 2020.

"Best Practices for Attribution" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Creative Commons Licensing: Nuts & Bolts" by Carrie Gits is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"CC License Compatibility Chart" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"CC License Conditions" by William Meinke is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Considerations for licensors and licensees" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Module 4: Copyright & Open Licensing - Assignment: Create OER" in the Open Education Primer by SPARC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Module 8: Sharing OER" by Open Washington is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Putting a CC License on Your Work" by William Meinke is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"TASL" derivative work by Jack O’Grady, is licensed under CC BY 4.0 , based on TASL, created using Creative Commons logo, fixed by Quibik, public domain, retrieved from , and Graduation cap, public domain.