General information
Authors: A.A.Fuente, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain; A.Texeira, L.Morgado, Universidade Aberta, Portugal.
The general goal of this training material is to help teachers create academic materials while complying with the Intellectual Property (IP) laws, with licenses as the main point of interest. The focus is on Creative Commons (CC) licenses, as this licenses are probably the licenses of choice in the academic field.
Unit 1 introduces the main concepts needed to understand IP, including licenses. In Unit 2 we will learn about CC licenses and how to use them.
Unit 3 introduces additional IP concepts, as differences between countries in IP laws reside in these areas and they must be taken into account by the author of academic materials. These regional particularities are treated in Unit 4.
Creators of materials can use resources from others. In Unit 5 we will learn about the different types of resources that can be used, and a specific process to assure compliance with IP law when using these resources by checking the licenses. Unit 6 shows how to search for these resources considering the resource license.
The last unit is devoted to registration, which is usually the last thing done regarding IP when developing academic materials
Unit 2. Creative Commons licenses concepts
2.4. Using Creative Commons licenses (authors and users)
This section introduces additional information about the use of CC licenses: the three levels of the licenses (legal system, humans, and machines), and the use of licenses by authors and final users.
2.4.1. Levels of CC licenses
CC licenses can be used in three different levels.
The lower level would be the detailed legal wording attached to each of the licenses. This helps when applying the licenses in a given country and legal system, in case of litigation.
There is of course the human readable level of the licenses, in which the licenses can be read and easily understood by humans.
The machine level refers to the fact that the licenses can be embedded into metadata within the works themselves. This allows computer software (such as crawlers and search engines) to use license information and help users find the works needed.
2.4.2. CC licenses for authors (licensors)
When creating a work, an author should choose a license for it, stating which are the uses wanted for the work. CC licenses are an easy way to license because they are general, cover the most usual cases, and are easy to understand.
However, the author retains legal control upon the work, and the licenses are valid under IP law (they are mapped to the law of each country).
In any case, the licenses are oriented towards the free culture movement, encouraging the use and sharing of the work.
2.4.3. CC licenses for users (licensees)
CC licenses have also many advantages for users. Any work uses one of the only 6 common licenses, and the licenses are easy to understand. Therefore, it is much faster for the user to decide if a work can be used or not (no need to read a different license for each work), and it is easy to find legally valid resources to use. In fact, there are many search engines for resources that can use CC license information to filter the results.