Copyright and Open Licensing
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain what copyright and open licenses are
• Describe the four different Creative Commons License components
• License successfully your work
• Reuse CC-licensed materials attributing them correctly in order to create your own language OER
• Use CC Attribution Builder
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Learning Objectives
Do you want to test your knowledge about open Licensing?
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).
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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 chapter gives an outline of the Creative Commons (CC) as this is the most widely used licensing system.
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