Overview

As noted earlier, open educational resources (OER) are materials that have been released under an intellectual property license that permits the use and re-purposing of the resource by others. We will now consider copyright and Creative Commons licenses as they relate to the licensing of OER. You are likely already familiar with copyright in a variety of contexts, including in business, higher education, K12, and adult education. You may also already be familiar with, or at least heard of, open licenses and Creative Commons. This section on copyright and Creative Commons is not meant to be a comprehensive manual regarding copyright and open licenses, but instead an overview with signposts to relevant and important information for further investigation.

As an introduction to copyright and Creative Commons licenses, please watch this brief video (3:20 minutes):

Source: A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

Copyright & Creative Commons

In this part of the course, we will consider copyright, the legal right of a creator of original work, and Creative Commons license provisions that amend standard copyright provisions to enable reuse, remixing, and redistribution of works. If you feel you are already quite familiar with copyright and open licenses you may skim this part, although we strongly encourage you to at least engage with the module's reflection and discussion questions. We start with an overview of copyright and Creative Commons, as shown in the table below.

“Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution. This is usually only for a limited time” (“Copyright”, 2015, para. 1). Any time an individual or group creates something, such as an image, they automatically have the rights to that image and copies of it, i.e. copyright. They do not need to register with any organization in order to get the copyrights for their work, it is assumed as soon as they create it. This means that others are required to seek permission, and often pay a fee, in order to use the work. For example, photographers might sell their photos to a magazine under the condition that they will be paid based on the number of copies printed or sold.

Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that provides a set of legal and other tools that enable reuse, remixing, and redistribution of creative works. A Creative Commons license allows creators to share their work with fewer restrictions than copyright alone. Every work still has copyright applied to it; the CC licenses are additional conditions that layer on top of the basic copyrights. There are four distinct conditions, or modules, available in a creative commons license: attribution, share-alike, non-commercial, and no derivatives. Upon creating a work, an author may attach a creative commons license that offers a combination of these conditions.

Creative Commons Conditions

The Creative Commons license conditions are outlined in the table below:

	Attribution - BY Others may copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work, and create derivatives based on (adapt, modify) your work, so long as they give you credit the way you request.
	Non-Commercial - NC Others may copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work, and create derivatives based on (adapt, modify) you work, but for non-commercial purposes only.
	Share Alike - SA Others may create and distribute derivatives based on (adapt, modify) your work, but they must use an identical license to the license that your work uses.
	No Derivative Works - ND Others may distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work, however, they must be your work verbatim, not derivatives of your work.
	Public Domain - PD (Zero) Indicates that the author has waived all copyrights to the work and has released it into the public domain.

Public Domain

Creative works may also be in the Public Domain, meaning that the creator’s copyrights have expired, been forfeited, or are inapplicable. In this case, the content is free to reuse, remix, and redistribute without restriction. Creative Commons's CC0 tool allows a creator to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain. In addition, Creative Common's Public Domain Mark is available for works that are free of known copyright.