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 6. Searching for resources
6.2. Search engines
There are different types of search engines available, from the most general ones to engines specialized in searching copyrighted resources.
The generic engines are general internet search engines such as Google and Bing. Generic engines can be used to find resources on the internet. They could also be used to find license information about the resource if it is included in text form in the same place as the resource, although the precision of this search varies.
Some of these generic engines have been adapted to include filters based on license information in the search for a specific type of resource, and sometimes other information for the metadata of the resource. For example, Google can search for images, filtering by the CC license, and image properties such as size and resolution.
There are also engines specialized in searching for a type (or types) of resource (for example, icons search). Most of them can search not only using specific properties of the resource (metadata) and the content, but also using license information.