Creative Commons licensing tools

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Friday 10 December 2010 at 9:00am
Tags: copyright | creative commons | licensing |

Comments (0)

If you have created an educational resource and are the sole copyright owner, and you want to make it available for use by some or all of the public either for specific purposes (e.g. non-commercial use) or according to certain conditions (e.g. no derivative works allowed), then you can release it as an Open Educational Resource (OER) with one of several types of Creative Commons licence.

Creative Commons (CC) is a not-for-profit organisation who offer free use of their licensing system, which allows you to define who can re-use your resources, for what purpose, and how they can alter or adapt your material (if at all) by assigning the appropriate type of CC licence to it. The Creative Commons website offers a simple set of multiple choice questions to help you choose the right licence for your own materials.

But what if your materials include content made by other people, which you in turn are using under the terms of their Creative Commons licence? Or material from multiple CC sources?? You need to be aware of how you are allowed to relicense their material.

Amongst the wealth of information in JISC InfoNet's Open Educational Resources infokit we found the interactive table below, which was created by Creative Commons Taiwan. It is a tool which allows you to select the CC licence(s) of the CC material(s) used within your OER, and tells you what licence types you in turn are allowed to grant to users of your work, whilst respecting the licence terms of your CC contributors.

click here or on the table to open the interactive version at creativecommons.org

I found the instructions a little convoluted, so here is my interpretation of them:

1. Check the CC licence terms of all CC materials you are using within your OER
2. Select all these licence types by checking one or more of the left hand column boxes
3. Smiley faces indicate the licence types compatible with subsequent relicensing of each selected licence type
   
4. For multiple selections, available CC licence type(s) you can use for your work are indicated by blue columns below the compatible licence(s), as illustrated above ¹
5. If you have selected multiple licences and no columns are highlighted blue then you may be using incompatible materials. You may need to remove some source materials - the smiley faces may help you choose which these need to be - or contact copyright holders for special permission

The various licence types are indicated by the official CC icons - here is a key:

- Attribution (BY)
- Share Alike (SA)
- No Derivatives (ND)
- Non-Commercial (NC)
- Public Domain ² (PD)
- Sampling ³
- Sampling Plus ³

click on the icons or text to open details of the respective licence

¹ In this example, sources include (BY), (BY-ND), (BY-NC-ND) and (PD) licensed materials. The only licence compatible with all these contributors is (BY-NC-ND), as the blue column indicates.

² The Public Domain Certification licence used for dedicating works to the public domain, free to be re-used by anyone in any form for any purpose, with no rights reserved, has recently (Oct 2010) been split into the Public Domain Mark - No Known Copyright and CC0 - No Rights Reserved licences, which are applicable to slightly different groups of resources.

³ These definitions have been retired from the current CC licensing schema, and whilst their terms should be respected when using source materials, application to new works is not recommended.

We're hoping to post more advice on Creative Commons and OERs in the new year, but hopefully this blog will serve as a quick introduction for the uninitiated, and has a couple of useful tips even for the experts!

Comments (0)