John B. Cade Library OER Learning Modules: Module 3 Creative Commons Licenses

Copyright is a form of legal protection for authors of original works in both published and unpublished formats.

The copyright status of a work determines what you can and cannot do with it. [1] As you explore OER for use in your classroom, you must understand your rights over the works you create and what it means to give those rights away.

Most copyrighted works are under full, "all rights reserved" copyright. All rights reserved means that works cannot be reused in any way without permission from the work's rightsholder (usually the creator). One way you can get permission to use someone else's work is through a license, statement, or contract that allows you to perform, display, reproduce, or adapt a copyrighted work under the license's circumstances. For example, the copyright holder for a popular book might sign a license to provide a movie studio with one-time rights to use their characters in a film.

Attribution: "Licensing" and "Public Domain" were adapted in part from UH OER Training by Billy Meinke, licensed CC BY 4.0. ↵

Copyright matters, because as educators, we often use content created by others, and create content for others to use. 

What is copyright? 

Copyright is a form of legal protection that affords the copyright owner the exclusive rights to, among other things: 

1. Reproduce (copy) 

2. Distribute 

3. Publicly perform 

4. Public display 

5. Create “derivative works” (e.g., translations, revisions, other modifications) 

Without permission from the copyright owner, or an applicable exception such as fair dealing under the Copyright Act, it is a violation of copyright law to exercise any of the copyright owner's exclusive rights. 

A copyright license is a grant of permission to use certain copyright rights. Copyright licenses often have specific limitations that are outlined. For example, they may: 

• Be limited in time 

• Contain geographical restrictions 

• Only allow for educational uses 

• Only grant permission to use some of the copyright rights (for example, a license may grant permission to download and distribute a work, but not the right to create derivative works) 

When evaluating the permitted scope of uses, read all copyright language closely. Using a work in a manner that exceeds the scope of permissions granted in a license is copyright infringement. 

How to Determine Permissions 

Follow this simplified checklist to determine the use permissions of the resources that you find online: 

• Look carefully at the resource you want to use and any information surrounding the resource to identify licensing information. 

• Also review the "about" and "terms of use" pages of the resource's website for permissions and licensing information. 

• If you cannot find a symbol or statement of the license or the permissions for use, the copyright owner will retain all their exclusive rights. 

If an OER is available under a copyright license that restricts certain (re)uses, you can make a fair use assessment for reproducing or adapting that work. However, having explicit permission is preferable. It is not recommended to use fully copyrighted works in OER projects without written permission from the work’s rightsholder.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are public licenses. You can use them to indicate what other people are allowed to do with your work. Each work is automatically protected by copyright, which means that others will need to ask permission from you as a copyright owner. 

Creative Commons (CC) is the author and steward of a family of copyright licenses that provide a free and easy mechanism for copyright holders to:

• Provide everyone in the world with permission to engage in a specific set of activities (like the 5Rs)
• Given they abide by specific conditions. 

CC Licenses -Families of Conditions

1. All licenses require the user to provide attribution.

2. The licenses provide three options around the creation and distribution of derivative works.

3. The licenses provide two options around commercial use.

When exercising any of the rights granted to you under a CC license, you are required to provide attribution to anyone designated by the licensor (could be one or more creators, organizations, etc.)

This condition, represented by the Creative Commons  icon and shortened to "BY", is present in all six Creative Commons licenses. 

A derivative work is a new work based on an existing, copyrighted work that is sufficiently creative to deserve its own copyright. 

Examples include Making a book into a movie, translating an essay into another language.

Non-Examples: Correcting punctuation or spelling, converting an essay from PDF to HTML.

The 3 options 

1. No mention/ no icon- derivative works can be created and shared.

2. Share Alike  (SA)- if derivatives are shared, they must be shared under the same license as the original work.

3. No Derivatives  (ND)- derivatives can be created but not shared (changes that don't result in derivatives can be shared.

Commercial use is defined as "primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation"

This definition is written in an intentionally vague manner in order to encourage over-compliance. Commercial use is always defined in terms of how the resource is used and never defined in terms of who the user is (e.g., a for-profit or non-profit)

Creative Commons, commercial use provides (2) options:

1. No mention/no icon- commercial use is allowed.
2. Noncommercial (NC)- commercial use is not allowed.

Attribution: "What are Creative Commons licenses?" is licensed under CC BY 4.0

There are six different types of Creative Commons licenses. These licenses are designed so that creators have options to provide restrictions on how they want their work to be used. They are made up of four license elements.

Anatomy of a CC License by Rie Namba, licensed CC BY 4.0

Understanding four license elements

Attribution (BY)

“BY” refers to attribution. This means in order to use the work, you must attribute the author of the work. All of the Creative Commons licenses require this condition (CC0 does not, but according to the CC FAQs is it not a “license”).

Share Alike means that if you create an adaptation of a work that has this license, the adaptation must be licensed under the same or a compatible license. See the Creative Commons page on compatible licenses to learn more.

NonCommercial (NC)

NC means that the work may only be used for non-commercial purpose. In NC licenses, non-commercial is defined as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation” (see, e.g., CC BY-NC 4.0). What matters here is the use to which the work is being put, not the user: one has to consider whether the use is for a commercial purpose, not whether the user is a commercial entity. A for-profit company could possibly use a work licensed CC BY-NC in a non-commercial way. In addition, using the work in a tuition-based educational course may still be considered a non-commercial use. The definition of “non-commercial” in these licenses is somewhat vague, and while some uses are clearly commercial and others clearly not, some may be in more of a grey zone.

Find more information on how Creative Commons interprets non-commercial use on the CC Wiki.

No Derivatives (ND)

ND means that you cannot share an adaptation of the work, though you could use and share it in its original form. An example of an adaptation of an image would be changing its open courseware, blurring it, or adding another image on top of it. An example of an adaptation of a written work would be translating it to a different language. The points below, adapted from section 3.3 of the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians, provide more details on what is and is not considered an adaptation:

• Syncing a musical work with a moving image is an adaptation regardless of what applicable copyright law may otherwise provide.

• Technical format-shifting (for example, converting a licensed work from a digital format to a physical copy) is not an adaptation regardless of what applicable copyright law may otherwise provide.

• Fixing minor problems with spelling or punctuation is not an adaptation.

• Reproducing and putting works together into a collection is not an adaptation of the individual works so long as they have not themselves been adapted. For example, combining stand-alone essays by several authors into an essay collection for use as an open textbook is a collection and not an adaptation. Most opencourseware is a collection of others’ open educational resources (OER).

• Including an image alongside text, as in a blog post, a slide, or an article, does not create an adaptation unless the photo itself is adapted.

There are six different license types, listed from most to least permissive here: 

The chart below illustrates the allowable commercial use for creative commons licenses.

	Derivatives Can Be Shared	Derivatives Can Be Shared ONLY IF You Share Alike	Derivatives CANNOT Be Shared
Commercial Use Allowed
Commercial Use NOT Allowed

What Are the Different Types of Creative Commons Licenses? – POSETest (bccampus.ca)

One of the tenets of OER laid out early on in the open education movement was the idea of the 5 Rs (originally the 4 Rs) introduced by David Wiley.^[1] These five attributes lay out what it means for something to be truly “open,” as the term is used in open education. The 5 Rs include:

• Retain = the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.
• Reuse = the right to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise = the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix = the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new
• Redistribute = the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

While the “redistribute” and “revise” rights are the most commonly exercised rights in open education, each of the five plays an important role in the utility of an open educational resource. For example, without the right to “remix” materials, an instructor who teaches an interdisciplinary course would not be able to combine two disparate OER into a new resource that more closely fits their needs.

RETAIN
REVISE
REMIX
REUSE
REDISTRIBUTE

 Definitely Allowed

 Definitely Not Allowed

Possibly Allowed

	Is this OER?	Is it safe to use in my OER work?
	YES	YES
	YES	YES
	YES	Maybe. What are the odds that the licensor will interpret your use as commercial? Are you willing to take that risk?
	YES	Maybe. What are the odds that the licensor will interpret your use as commercial? Are you willing to take that risk?
	NO	NO
	NO	No

There are six different license types, listed from most to least permissive here: 

WHAT IS THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?

According to The phrase "public domain" (PD) isn't in the U.S. Copyright Act. It is, however, commonly used to refer to content that isn't protected by copyright law.

Works that are in the public domain may be used freely, without obtaining permission from or compensating the copyright owner.

Public domain works, or content that isn't protected by copyright law, may not be protected for a variety of reasons, including the following:

• The duration of copyright in the work has expired — In the U.S., for example, the copyright in a book expires 70 years after the death of its author. The minimum duration of copyright protection as set out in the leading copyright treaty, the Berne Convention, is life-plus-fifty but many countries now have a life-plus-seventy duration as in the U.S. (See the section below on Public Domain in Other Countries.)
• The work was produced by the U.S. federal government — In the U.S., works produced by the federal government don't have copyright protection. However, a work produced by a consultant or freelancer to the government may have protection and the original copyright owner may transfer that copyright to the government. Note that in other countries, such as Canada, there is copyright protection in federal government works.
• The work isn't fixed in a tangible form — A work such as a speech, lecture or improvisational comedy routine that hasn't previously been written or recorded in any manner isn't protected by copyright and therefore is in the public domain.
• The work didn't include a proper copyright notice prior to 1 March 1989 — In the U.S., this doesn't apply to works created after 1 March 1989, when a copyright notice became no longer mandatory to protect a work. However, prior to that date, notice of copyright was necessary on all published works. Without this notice, the work went into the public domain. Most countries don't have a copyright notice requirement. Note that Berne member countries cannot have any requirements such as a copyright notice in order for authors to have copyright protection in their works — that's always automatic in Berne Convention countries.
• The work doesn't have sufficient originality — Examples of works that may not have sufficient originality to be eligible for protection by copyright include lists or tables with content from public documents or other common sources.

In terms of copyright protection, works in the public domain in the U.S. generally include the following:

• U.S. Federal legislative enactments and other official documents
• Titles of books or movies, short phrases and slogans, lettering or coloring
• News, history, facts or ideas (note that a description of an idea in text or images, for example, may be protected by copyright)
• Plots, characters and themes from works of fiction
• Procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries or devices. ^[1]

Works that are no longer protected by copyright are considered part of the public domain. Items in the public domain can be reused freely for any purpose by anyone, without giving attribution to the author or creator.^[1]

Public domain works in the U.S. include works whose creator died 70 years prior, works published before 1924, or works dedicated to the public domain by their rightsholder. The Creative Commons organization created a legal tool called CC 0 to help creators dedicate their work to the public domain by releasing all rights to it.^[2]

^{CC Legal Tools- CC Zero}

Use CC0 to dedicate a work to the public domain by waiving all of your copyright) and neighboring rights, if any) in a work, to the fullest extent permitted by the law.

If the waiver isn't effective for any reason, then CC0 acts as a license from the affirmer granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty free license to use the work for any purpose.

CC Legal Tools- Public Domin Mark

Using the Public Domin Mark, you can mark a work that is free of known copyright restrictions and clearly convey that status. When applied properly, the PDM allows the work to be easily discovered, and provides valuable information about the work.

1. WHAT IS THE PUBLIC DOMAIN? (2022, October 24). Copyrightlaws.com. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.copyrightlaws.com/what-is-the-public-domain/

Attribution: "What is an open license and how does it work?" The Council of Chief State School Officers is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Attribution: "Understanding Copyright, Public Domain, and Fair Use" is licensed under CC BY 4.0

To determine if Creative Commons licensing is right for you as a creator, or to understand how to interpret a Creative Commons deed for reusing works created by others, consult the following resources:

• About the Licenses

  Explains how the licenses were designed, what the licenses do, the three "layers" of the license, and the breakdown of license options.

• Tool for Choosing a License

  Step by step tool for choosing a license.

• Best Practices for Attribution

  CC-licensed materials can be used as long as the conditions named in the license deed are met along with attribution and linking back to the license deed. This link provides a range of examples modeling proper attribution practices.

Open Attribution Builder-This is a tool to help you build attributions. Click the About box to learn more. As you fill out the form, the app automatically generates the attribution for you.