Tutorial 4: How to choose a Creative common license
How to use this tutorial
This tutorial invites teacher to license their educational content under a creative commons licence. The tutorial will take about 20 minutes. For that, internet access is needed.
Structure of Tutorial
Introduction
In this tutorial, we assist some teachers to choose a Creative Common license.
- Tom wants to start a wiki for the collaborative creation of learning materials about Hypatia of Alexandria.
- Susan wants to publish her lecturer notes.
- Peter creates open content with his learning management system.
- The statistic teacher of tutorial 3(perhaps he gets a name?) wants to install a repository system.
Please remark, that this tutorial based on the information of the Creative Commons Organizations (state 2006-11-06)
Objectives of this tutorial
This tutorial provides information and practical tasks for:
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Task
- Overview over the different possibilities of Creative Commons License
- Including a Creative Commons license and button on the learning material
Why choosing a license?
In contrast to the U.S., in the European Union a Public Domain is unknown. This relinquishment of the intellectual property rights in favour to the public is not possible in European countries like Austria or Germany. That means for the E.U., that everybody have to ask the owner of the copyright of learning materials before using, copying, modifying and so on, and to place a contract.
With an open content licensing, one could profit about
- clear descriptions of the rights of the author(s) and the users
- licensing formulations which are proven by legal practitioner
- the awareness level of the license
- the possibility (for others) to search for your content with most of the search-engines, when they support your license
- and (if you choose such a license) you could be sure, that your name is noted and that all materials, that are basing on your work are published under the same conditions (share alike)
Suggestions and tips for decisions about special features
First of all, we recommend to choose a popular license to profit about
- it popularity and the possibility (for others) to search for your content with most of the search-engines, when they support your license
- to be ensure the reusablity of the content (especially when a share alike licence should be chosen: It is not very easy to mix up different licenses when mixing up open educational content).
Remember, that you can allways place an individual contract, e.g. for allowing commercial use, to vary from the license text!
Decisions for choosing a license
"Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public but only on certain conditions." (Creative commons Homepage 2006-11-07)
To choose a sufficient license the teacher have to decide, if the want allow commercial uses and modification of their work.
- To allow modification means, e.g. that others can correct, actualize, improve and adapt the content and that could be a reason, that the content will be used probably longer and more often. For which of the teachers that could be attractive?
- If they decide to allow modification, they can choose the "share alike" option. This means, that every modification has to be published under the same license. On the one side, this is a option to be sure that everything is going right, concerning the license itself. On the other side, it is very hard for other content creator to reuse such an "share alike" content, if they like to mix up open content with different license.
- Beside that, the teacher should decide, if they want to limit the usage to non-commercial use. That means, that other teachers are allowed to use it, if they are working in public schools or universities. But a publisher have to ask for permission, if he want to use the content in a book he wants to sell.
- Then the teacher should decide whether or not they want their names in every copy or modified version of the content. If they decide for the "attribution requirement", this could be a nice point for marketing.
Eleven combination of these options are possible!
| Now try it out, open the Creative Commons Website and choose a license. |
- For that, open the Creative Commons Website and
- click on the "Choose a license" tab,
- fill out the form,
- now you should see the license.
When you've made your choices, you'll get the appropriate license expressed in three ways:
- Commons Deed. A simple, plain-language summary of the license, complete with the relevant icons.
- Legal Code. The fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court.
- Digital Code. A machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use.
| Please assist Tom, Susan, Peter and the statistic teacher to choose a fitting license. Which license version do you recommend each of them? |
- Tom wants to start a wiki for the collaborative creation of learning materials about Hypatia of Alexandria.
- Susan wants to publish her lecturer notes.
- Peter creates open content with his learning management system.
- The statistic teacher of tutorial 3 (perhaps he gets a name?) wants to install a repository system.
Including a Creative Commons License
You should then include a Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" button on your site, near your work. This button will link back to the Commons Deed, so that the world can be notified of the license terms. If you find that your license is being violated, you may have grounds to sue under copyright infringement.
Including a creative Commons License is very easy. After your decision for a special license, just mark the code, copy it (e.g. with the key combination CTRL and C, on a Mac Command and C) and paste it in
... your webpage or website:
For that, you have to open your .html page in the code view (which means, with all the html-tags like <p></p>) and insert it (e.g. with the key combination CTRL and V, on a Mac Command and V). Please note, that you should it insert before you see </body></html>!
... by registering your open content in a repository:
For that, you have to insert the code in the field "copyright" (e.g. with the key combination CTRL and V, on a Mac Command and V)
We set up a sandbox for you for trying it out. For that,
(leider klappt es nicht mit diesem Wiki, man könnte ein cms aufsetzen, dass sie nach einigen Minuten zurücksetzt, wastl fragen)
- please open the Including a license Testpage
- click on the "edit" button
- inlclude the license text
- push the "save" button
- Please try it out now. Look at the result. Easy, isn't it?
- If you need further assistance in handling of an wiki you can take a look in the in our tutorial "Create Open Content" section "Using a Wiki"
Useful Material
- An overview about (other) licenses: Exemplary Collection of open content licensing approaches
- Creative Commons Tutorial: Publish website
- Creative Commons Comic: How it Works
- Creative Commons Comic: A Spectrum of Rights
Evaluation/Rubric
After that tutorial, the learner should have an overview about the Creative common license options and should be able to insert it.
Additional Information
Please note, that this tutorial is based upon the information and text of the Creatice Commons Organization (state 2006-11-06).
