6.1 What is Copyright?

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“Copyright abolition flag” by OpenSofias is licensed under CC01.0

Copyright is a type of intellectual property which protects the expression of an idea (Stim, 2013) in the form of creative work (literary, artistic, educational, or musical), giving its owner the exclusive right of reproduction, for limited time and/or number (Oxford dictionary). In fact, copyright limits a user's ability to modify in any way, re-use, share, or copy content. The user has the right to use only the purchased copy for one's personal use while all the rights of the content are reserved to the publisher. 

On the other hand, open licensing such as Creative Commons licenses allow authors and publishers to decide which rights they want to share with users and in fact they describe to the users how they can use what they have created. That means that open licensing is a significant constituent of an OER. It is crucial for those teachers who want to create, share or use OERs to understand how open licenses work. All OERs must be available under some type of open license and permissions, the most widely used of which being Creative Commons (CC) licenses, that enable reuse, adaptation, and republishing the materials by others. There are other open licenses for open educational material such as GNU Free Documentation License (Free Software Foundation, 2008) and Free Art License (Copyleft Attitude, 2007). However, this module gives an outline of the Creative Commons (CC) as this is the most widely used licensing system.

  • Remember that when a work has no copyright protection it enters the public domain. That means that anyone can use this resource, modify and publish it without any permission or restriction.
  • Explore also what happens in the case of fair use that permits a party to use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. 
  • Some teachers are under the impression that because they work in education, they’re allowed to use images, videos, audio, text etc. however they’d like. They assume this is considered “fair use”. Remember that all the content you find and want to use isn’t free to use just because you’re a teacher or a student. It’s important to note that this might depend on where you live.
  • Download the Fair Use Checklist: The Checklist and the intro is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution License with attribution to the original creators of the checklist Kenneth D. Crews (formerly of Columbia University) and Dwayne K. Buttler (University of Louisville).

Learning Activity 1

Watch the following video and reflect on what is the difference between copyright, open licences and fair use.

Click here to download the video transcript (PDF) (PDF document25.9 KB)

References

Copyleft Attitude. (2007). Free Art License 1.3. Retrieved from http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

Free Software Foundation. (2008). GNU Free Documentation License. Retrieved from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

Crews K. D.. Fair Use. Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved from https://copyright.columbia.edu/basics/fair-use.html

Stim, R. (27 March 2013). Copyright basics FAQ. Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center, Stanford University. Retrieved from https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright-basics/

Additional Resources

Ottenbreit-Leftwich, A. & Kimmons, R. (2020). The K-12 Educational Technology Handbook (1st ed.). EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/k12handbook

Check the chapter “Copyright and Open Licensing” by Royce Kimmons.