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 3. Additional Concepts
3.1. Types of work and duration of rights
Authors can collaborate, creating different types of works: individual, collaborative, and collective. When a work is created, the author (or authors) are granted all the rights on the work for a number of years, after which the work falls into the public domain.
3.1.1. Types of work
Depending on the type of collaboration between the authors when creating the work, we can distinguish between individual, collaborative, and collective works.
An individual work is the creation of just one author who is the only responsible of the work, without any help from others. For example, a paper written by one researcher.
A collaborative work is the creation of several authors, where there is not a clear division of the part of the work who can be attributed to each one. For example, a paper written by several researchers in collaboration.
A collective work is a work compiled from different works, each one clearly different from the others. In a collective work an editor compiles the parts composing the final work. For example, a book compiled from chapters from different authors.
3.1.2. Duration of rights
The author (or more properly, the owner of the rights) has a monopoly on the work, but this monopoly expires after a period of time. Then, the work falls into the public domain.
The duration of this monopoly period is defined in the IP law. The current standard is 70 years after the death of the last author alive for individual or collaborative works. In the case of collective works, it is 70 years after publication.