Creative Commons, Copyright and Education

Part 3. Introduction to Creative CommonsRowan Wilson

OUCS November 2009

First some history…

Image courtesy of mlinksva taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlinksva/3861200140/

Reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

• Founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman • Designed to push back against increased enclosure of software

source code• “I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself

writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.”

• Created the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allowed free redistribution and modification of the source code it covered to anyone

• A condition of the GPL is that if you use GPL’d code in your program, your program must also be GPL (infective/viral/copyleft)

Image courtesy of Robert Scoble taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/2236177028/

Reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

• Founded in 2001 by Prof Lawrence Lessig at the University of Stanford

• Designed to push back against increased enclosure of ‘intellectual commons’

• Six ‘general’, regionalised licences for easy sharing of rights in content

• A suite of machine-, human- and lawyer-readable licences

• Some cool icons

What are the conditions?

Attribution • Author must be acknowledged on all copies and

adaptations of the work, including a link to the original version of the work

What are the conditions?

Non-commercial • The work can only be used for non-commercial

purposes

What are the conditions?

No Derivatives• The work can only be distributed in its original form; no

adaptations or translations can be made

What are the conditions?

Sharealike• The work can be modified and adapted, but the entire

resulting work (including new material added by the adaptor) must be distributed under the same sharealike licence

What are the six licences?

Why regionalize?

• Unlike the authors of the GPL, the Creative Commons project decided that they would try to adapt their licences to the world’s differing legal jurisdictions to help ensure enforceability

• The UK has two sets – England & Wales and Scotland

• The former were created here in Oxford by a project at Wolfson College

• Regionalisation does not mean that you can only use resources under your local regionalized licence

What does adaptation mean?

• Changes made to the work itself• Some examples

– Re-use in educational material– Sampling your voice to use in electronic music– Incorporating still or moving images into a Youtube video

• Re-use must avoid ‘derogatory treatment’ meaning adaptation that risks having a detrimental effect on your reputation

• Syncing music to video represents an adaptation of both

What is a collective work?

• A work in which a series of unmodified works appear side by side

• Think of an anthology• Even works that do not allow derivatives can be

aggregated into a collective work, provided each work is not altered in itself and is not ‘contained’ within a larger single work.

How do I attribute?

• The author may have specified precisely how they wish to be attributed – always check

• Otherwise…• Keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the original

author 'credit reasonable to the medium' • Convey the title of the work if supplied• Include an URL for the work as long as the version of the work at

the URL includes ownership and licensing information• In an adaptation explain the use made of the work and credit the

original author as prominently as the adapter• Credit may be implemented 'in any reasonable manner'

How do I publish?

• http://www.creativecommons.org provides a web-based tool for applying CC licences to web resources

• Make sure the material is actually yours to publish

• Be wary of using logos that might be trademarks (except in attribution contexts)

Final Thoughts

• Unauthorised re-use is a fact of life• Creative Commons at least allows a creator to state

how they feel about copying and re-use in a well understood form

• Could you benefit from other people’s CC material?• Where do you fall on the continuum of openness?

Some questions

You want to include a photograph of Richard Stallman in a presentation you are doing on Creative Commons. You find one on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence that needs some cropping.

1) Does the licence allow you to crop and reproduce the image?

2) What information (if any) do you need to include with the image?

Some questions

If the image of Stallman had instead been under a Attribution-Share-alike 2.0 Licence…

1) Would that licence allow you to crop and reproduce the image?

2) Are there any other steps you’d need to take to be in compliance with the licence terms?

Some questions

You want to publish and sell a periodical consisting of complete Creative Commons-licensed articles by third parties. For each of these licences, say if an article under that licence could be used…

1) Attribution

2) Attribution-NonCommercial

3) Attribution-NoDerivs