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LTSN / RDN Interoperability Project Resources
Creative Commons – a route to facilitate using Higher Education Academy content?The subject centres in the Higher Education Academy create, or facilitate the creation of, a vast array of materials about learning and teaching. Subject centres want to make the adoption, sharing, and adaptation of that material as easy as possible for their constituencies to use in their quest for quality enhancement in UK higher education. Current copyright and IPR issues on materials created with subject centre funding/resources are unclear. By adopting a clear set of principles for the use of Academy funded materials, the use, adaptation and reuse of such materials will have a transparent process, which facilitates our constituencies sharing and improving our resource, increasing the intellectual capital in the quality enhancement of learning and teaching. There are many ways that materials may be shared. For example, imagine a set of materials is created with subject centre miniproject funding on curriculum mapping, which is launched at a subject centre workshop. The materials are of very high quality and can be customised by individuals to be more easily mapped onto their own institutions curriculum. The materials are posted to the subject centre website. Under current copyright law users will have to ask permission to use and adapt the materials. With a Creative Commons licence this permission is already granted, and so using and adapting the material is easy. A number of subject centres have expressed an interest in adopting a more open licensing structure to facilitate easier sharing and dissemination of content. This briefing looks at the benefits of this approach to the Higher Education Academy, presents some background to Creative Commons, and annexes the draft CC-UK licence currently under discussion. BackgroundThe JISC is currently working on a set of Creative Commons type licences (CC-UK), which comply with UK copyright law (The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, amended 2003). The CC-UK licence , being developed by Oxford University on behalf of the Creative Commons international division is expected to launch in September. There will be a JORUM licence made available as a model licence in July by the JISC. We believe that this work complements the JISC work currently being led by Charles Duncan on Digital Rights Management which seeks to establish the technical mechanisms for managing the rights to digital materials. Creative CommonsCreative Commons started life as a project to create a set of licences that complement copyright law, but which allow certain uses of work automatically. The author(s) either assign their work to the public domain, or retain the legal copyright and grant licences for the use of their work. (Of course, as with all copyright, they retain the moral right to be identified as the originator of the work.) Simply put it means that you don’t have to send an email or make a phone call to find out if you can use or adapt materials, because with a CC licence that permission is already granted for many uses either with some rights reserved, or with no rights reserved, depending on the type of licence assigned to that work. It is an easy way to facilitate collaboration by automatically allowing certain uses of your work. CC released of a set of such copyright licences free for public use in 2001. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) , Creative Commons helps people dedicate work to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, with certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licences are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. ExamplesOne high profile project that has adopted CC licencing is the MIT OpenCourseWare project. Rice University’s Connexions Repository is another educational example. OpenPhoto is a repository of hundreds of stock photos licenced for free commercial and non-commercial whereby all you have to do to use these images is provide attribution - photo © openphoto.net From the CC website: “Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."” Advantages of a Creative Commons type approach for the Higher Education Academy
How it worksOffering your work under a Creative Commons licence does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions. AttributionYou let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give you credit. Example: Jane publishes her photograph with an Attribution licence; because she wants the world to use her pictures provided they give her credit. Bob finds her photograph online and wants to display it on the front page of his website. Bob puts Jane's picture on his site, and clearly indicates Jane's authorship. Non-commercialYou let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for non-commercial purposes only. Examples: Gus publishes his photograph with a Non-commercial licence. Camille incorporates a piece of Gus's image into a collage poster. Camille is not allowed to sell her collage poster without Gus's permission. No Derivative WorksYou let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. Example: Sara licences a recording of her song with a No Derivative Works licence. Joe would like to cut Sara's track and mix it with his own to produce an entirely new song. Joe cannot do this without Jane's permission (unless his song amounts to fair use). Share AlikeYou allow others to distribute derivative works only under a licence identical to the licence that governs your work. Note: A licence cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works. Example: Gus's online photo is licenced under the Non-commercial and Share Alike terms. Camille is an amateur collage artist, and she takes Gus's photo and puts it into one of her collages. This Share Alike language requires Camille to make her collage available on a Non-commercial plus Share Alike licence. It makes her offer her work back to the world on the same terms Gus gave her. When you've made your choices, you get the appropriate licence expressed in three ways:
A Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" button should be added to the site, near the work it relates to. This button will link back to the Commons Deed, so that the world can be notified of the licence terms. If you find that your licence is being violated, you may have grounds to sue under copyright infringement. Open content, open softwareThe GNU Free Documentation Licence is the recommended licence for software and documentation about software. The Academy may wish to adopt this kind of licensing for the code for Connect services, interoperability tools and its own website, to facilitate the adoption, sharing and improvement of its services. Suzanne Hardy, Information Officer/C&IT Manager, LTSN-01 |
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