Copyright public domain and creative commons for educators

Copyright, Public Domain & Creative

Commons for educators

Bite sized learning from the CTL at Athens Technical College – Robin Fay, Portal Manager, CTL

What you need to know about licensingLicensing types – creative commons, public domain, copyrightTools to determine copyright/public domainFinding content you can use

Note: Information collecting regarding copyright law is accurate (in as much as can be determined from research), but should not be taken as legal advice.

Agenda

Anyone can create and distribute content on the internet. Most likely you are already doing this – if you post to Facebook, blog, share links on a public webpage or syllabus, have a website…

https://www.flickr.com/photos/amit-agarwal/14338944877

Licensing 101

1. To ensure that you get proper credit of your work * (any intellectual property agreements you sign as part of a publishing contract or employment will take precedent)

2. To encourage sharing of your content and contribute to scholarly activities in your area of expertise.

3. It makes your job easier in that you can find educational content more readily. (and it can save students money!)

4. Violating copyright is illegal. "Copy-roger" by Jose - Indymedia Mexico. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copy-roger.png#/media/File:Copy-roger.png

Why should you care

Copyright: A legal statement about ownership and rights Rights: Whether you can use an item, to what extent, and how Creative Commons: Developed to make copyright easier to understand and more transparent for content creators

Quick Terminology

Public Domain: Content for which copyright does not apply or has expired

Alices’ adventures in wonderland is public domain; Micky Mouse is not yet…

Source: Project Guttenberg (Public Domain)

Quick terminology: Public Domain

Public domain is unrestricted access – essentially either the copyright expired, is not copyrightable (ideas, facts, etc.), is assigned public domain by its creator.

these are generally public domain: • all works published in the U.S. before 1923• all works published with a copyright notice from

1923 through 1963 without copyright renewal• all works published without a copyright notice from

1923 through 1977• all works published without a copyright notice from

1978 through March 1, 1989, and without subsequent registration within 5 years

• the default term is life of the author plus 70 years

PUBLIC DOMAIN - not copyright

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States

Copyright overview (when it expires)

Fair Use: An exception to the copyright laws to allow copyrighted materials to be used for educational purposes – it is not all inclusive and has restrictions

Quick terminology: Fair Use

In US copyright law, a doctrine that brief excerpts of copyright material may, under certain circumstances, be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research, without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder.

Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing act (wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)

FAIR USE – a copyright exemption

We used to share photos via an physical book of photographic prints. Because we controlled access and it remained in our private areas (e.g., our houses), most of us didn’t think about copyright and the government did not know all of the things we created (unless we published it or donated our photo album to a library, at which point they would determine the rights.

How content has changed

Now, you would likely share your photos through the web• Upload and share through social media

(Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, etc.)• Upload to your own website• Send via email or text/apps (Snapchat,

Instagram private)

We are all content creators

The act of uploading or posting to any website is publishing it. Anything published to the web, is considered to be copyrighted.

So, when you upload a new photo, you are publishing it and in fact, copyrighting it. If you do not assign rights to it, then copyright is all rights reserved by YOU, e.g., no one else can use it without your explicit permission*

And publishers…

HOWEVER, 3rd party sites (Flickr, Facebook, etc.) and apps (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) have TOS (Terms of Services) that apply to your content. Typically, you see the TOS when you first sign up for a service.

Do they own it or do you own it? It depends upon the TOS.

What about social media?

• Sharing a link to an image, article, video, etc. usually retains the chain of ownership and rights (provenance), ensuring that copyright is not violated.

• However, downloading the item and then

re-sharing it may or may not be legal (depends upon the rights or if using under Fair Use how much and how long you will use it)

What about content that does not belong to you?

• As you can see from the previous examples, because of the web, copyright can get complicated very quickly.

• Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Digital Assessment Management(DAM) are tools to enforce copyright with digital materials. An example of DRM in use is the limitation of only loading a music mp3 on a certain number of devices. This is controlled by encoded data (actually rights metadata).

Managing rights with digital materials

• Content that is licensed for use in some capacity is consider to be open. Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials (quizzes, simulations, lesson plans, etc.) that can be reused. Software that can be shared or used by others is Opensource.

A quick word about Open..

• Not all software, devices, and content has DRM or DAM.

• Not all content on the web has an explicit copyright statement (or even usage statement).

• Creative commons simplifies this process.

This is why creative commons is so useful..

Main options are • Derivatives (ND) - whether a user can

make deriatives (use your content to make new content, remix your content)

• ShareAlike (SA) - can it be shared following the original license

• NonCommercial (NC) - not for commercial uses

• So what would CC By-NC-ND be?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Creative commons licenses

• Digital copyright slider - http://librarycopyright.net/resources/digitalslider/ (determines if something has a copyright or is public domain)

• Creative Commons license creator https://creativecommons.org/choose/

• Creative Commons license creator for Microsoft products http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13303

• Can this material be digitized? http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2007/12/copyright-review-flow-chart-v3x.pdf

• Fair Use Evaluator - http://librarycopyright.net/resources/fairuse/• Fair use checklist

https://copyright.columbia.edu/content/dam/copyright/Precedent%20Docs/fairusechecklist.pdf

Copyright tools

CC Search screenSearching by rights at the CC site

Searching by rights and multiple sites via the CC search engine

Searching by rights and multiple sites via the CC search engine

Results

• Bing does too – search first and then refineSearching by rights in Bing

Google search and refine

• Search and refine by license in Google (or use advanced search)

• Advanced search (all materials can limit by file type): https://www.google.com/advanced_search

•

Searching by rights – Google advanced

• Advanced image search – can search by color, type, size, and rights etc. https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search

• Tip: search transparent and wide for best fit for powerpoint (transparent = no background)

Searching by rights – advanced image search

Images & Film• Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/portal/• Everystockphoto http://www.everystockphoto.com/• Flickr by rights https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/• Library of Congress’s list of Public Domain film resources http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/pubdomain.html • NASA free images http://www.nasa.gov/connect/artspace/participate/royalty_free_resources.html• New York Times Public Domain Archives

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_Domain_Images_from_the_New_York_Times• PicFindr http://www.picfindr.com/ (aggregates searching)• Pics4Learning http://www.pics4learning.com/ (free images for education)• Pixabay https://pixabay.com/• Wikipedia Public Domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources• Wikimedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ; New York Times public domain

photographs  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_Domain_Images_from_the_New_York_Times

• Smithsonian Public Domain photographs (on Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian • Search engines by rights and image search (Bing, Google, etc.)

See CTL’s resource handout http://goo.gl/KZ7Bex

OER resources, free books, images and more

Robin Fayrfay@athenstech.edu

Nikki Stubbsbstubbs@tcsg.edu

Thank you! More at ctlblog.athenstech.edu