Creative Commons & Open

Creative Commons licenses are most often associated with Open materials. In general, Open materials will be copyrighted AND have a Creative Commons license that lets you know exactly how you can use the materials.

All Creative Commons licenses allow you to share the work as long as you attribute the creator. Therefore, you can upload these materials directly to your D2L website (as long as you attribute the creator) without worrying about fair use rules and copyright infringement.

See the table in the document below (or link out here) for an overview of the types of Creative Commons licenses.

Choosing a License

If you are customizing or creating an OER, then you will want to consider choosing a Creative Commons license for your resource. The best way to decide which is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share your work, and how you hope others will use that work.

For help, try the Creative Commons License Chooser.

Before Licensing

Before you apply a CC license or CC0 to your work, there are some important things to consider:

The licenses and CC0 cannot be revoked. This means once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright, even if you later stop distributing it.

You must own or control copyright in the work. Only the copyright holder or someone with express permission from the copyright holder can apply a CC license or CC0 to a copyrighted work. If you created a work in the scope of your job, you may not be the holder of the copyright.

See this page for more pre-licensing considerations.

How to apply a CC license or CC0 to your work

CC-licensing your work is simple. All you have to do is choose the CC license that suits your needs and then communicate this choice in a way that will be clear to people who come across your work. As part of this communication, you should include a link to the license you’ve chosen.

This can be as simple as a bit of text stating and linking to the license in a copyright notice, like this:

© 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.

…or as complex as embedding the license information on your website using the HTML code associated with the particular license. Use the Creative Commons License Chooser to get the relevant HTML code.