Plaintext
Creative Commons Licensing
Workshop for CCD
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan@poritz.net
www.poritz.net/jonathan
Center for Teaching and Learning and
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Colorado State University-Pueblo
10 April 2020, Online
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
These slides available at poritz.net/j/share/CCLWS4CCD/ .
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0 The Plan
The goal of this workshop is to give a quick (well, three hour...) overview
of the material in the Creative Commons Certificate, which is an intensive,
online, 10-week course offered by the Creative Commons Organization.
The CC cert comes in two variants, both organized into five units:
1. What is Creative Commons?
2. Copyright Law
3. Anatomy of a CC License
4. Using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works
5. Creative Commons for Educators
or
Creative Commons for Librarians
We’ll discuss each of these topics, in order, with quick assignments for
each unit, and short breaks.
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Unit 1. What is Creative Commons?
“Creative Commons is a set of legal tools, a nonprofit organization,
as well as a global network and a movement all inspired by peoples
willingness to share their creativity and knowledge, and enabled by
a set of open copyright licenses.
Creative Commons began in response to an outdated global copy-
right legal system. CC licenses are built on copyright and are de-
signed to give more options to creators who want to share. Over
time, the role and value of Creative Commons has expanded.”1
[Perhaps this is mostly just interesting context. It does make a nice warm-up before the technicalities of copyright law and
license details, though.]
We’ll divide this unit into two pieces.
1
The large block quotes in italics used in these slides are taken from the 2020 Course Content of the Creative Commons
Certificate, which is by the Creative Commons and released under a CC BY 4.0 International license.
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1.1 The History of Creative Commons
The official position on this history is, as we saw, that “Creative Commons
began in response to an outdated global copyright legal system.”
This is not a surprising position since two of CC’s founders were
• Larry Lessig, then of Stanford Law, now at Harvard Law, and
• Eric Eldred, a literacy advocate a web publisher of works in the public
domain.
Lessig represented Eldred in Eldred v. Ashcroft, challenging the “Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act” [CTEA] of 1998, all the way to the
US Supreme Court. [Where they lost, in 2003.]
The CTEA extended the term of copy- 2
rights, even for already existing works!,
by 20 years, making copyright last for
the life of the creator plus 70 years.
2
“Trend of Maximum U.S. General Copyright Term,” by Tom W. Bell was released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License..
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1 So They Founded Creative Commons...
In frustration, and perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing,
Lessig, Eldred, and a computer science professor Hal Abelson of MIT,
founded the nonprofit Creative Commons in 2001.
In addition to fighting a loosing battle against the CTEA, the CC founders
felt that copyrights of even much shorter duration we in conflict with
modern technology:
“The internet has given us the opportunity to access, share, and
collaborate on human creations (all governed by copyright) at an
unprecedented scale. The sharing capabilities made possible by
digital technology are in tension with the sharing restrictions em-
bedded within copyright laws around the world.”
I.e.,
sharing possibilities tension restrictions of
!
of the Internet copyright law
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1 ...As an Alternative to All-Rights-Reserved Copyright
The CC approach to relieving this tension was to create a suite of licenses
whose powers stem from the powers given to creators by copyrights
which allow creators to share their works in a more precise way than
merely the “all-rights-reserved” of traditional, basic copyrights.
Much more about the CC “suite of licenses” and the “powers given to
creators by copyrights, below [in Units 3 and 2, respectively].
But first, an alternative to the above [CC-sanctioned] history:
Creative Commons was not the first commons-based, open movement.
It wasn’t the first one in modern times: that honor 3
probably goes to the free/libre/open-source software
[FLOSS] movement.
I assert that there is a much older tension in the Western
[I don’t know others well enough to say] tradition which bears on the history of CC.
3
“Linux 2.0 Penguins,” by Larry Ewing <lewing@isc.tamu.edu> and The GIMP.
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1 The prehistory of FLOSS
The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio
Image in the public domain: Raffaello died in 1520. Original in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. This version:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22The School of Athens%22 by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino.jpg.
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1 Pythagoras: Keeping knowledge secret on pain of death
He didn’t prove or originate “his” theorem.
The Pythagoreans were not unlike a cult, with odd
dietary restrictions, belief in their leader’s magical
powers (talking to animals, etc.), divided as:
• mathematikoi [“learners”] who lived√ apart and
knew hidden mysteries (e.g., that 2 is irra-
tional4 ); and
• akousmatikoi [“listeners”] who lived with their
families and only aspired to greater secrets.
Hippasus of Metapontum, a renegade mathematikos, was tracked √ down
and executed for the crime of revealing to the public that 2 is irrational.
[Pythagoras himself was killed when unwilling to step into a bean field
despite being pursued by an angry mob.]
4 √
meaning that there do not exist whole numbers p and q such that 2 = p/q
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1 Euclid’s radical openness
He was a librarian. [in Ptolemaic Alexandria]
His Elements of Geometry had more editions and
influence than any other book [in the West; other
than the Christian Bible].
The Elements was loved by Galileo, Newton,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Abraham Lincoln, Al-
bert Einstein ... and many, many others5
For hundreds of years [in the west] it was consid-
ered a right of passage in the education of [yes, male
and elite] young people to master The Elements.
The Elements was so influential because it was completely open, laying
out all of its Theorems with proofs [including one that √2 ∈/ Q].
Proofs are like like the source code if a theorem were a program: Yes, Euclid was doing FLOSS [free/libre/open-source software]
more than 2K years before the invention of the computer!
5
E.g., Moby Dick says that the difficulty of whales mentally putting together the two images perceived by their widely
separated eyes must be as if a human were ”simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.”
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1 When FLOSS became FLOSS
Euclid’s radical openness is the foundation of mod-
ern mathematics, science, and the whole Academy.
E.g., a modern scientific paper has a standard
format, including sections for Methods and Re-
sults... that’s pretty open.
This is what Richard Stallman describes when he
talks about founding the GNU Project and the Free
Software Movement in the 1980s: while at MIT,
he wanted to improve a printer driver and he ex-
pected the manufacturer would share it’s source
code with him, the way scientists share methods
which each other. His frustration
when they wouldn’t lead him to
This image GNU head, by start down the GNU path. key regulator ofThis paper Yeast -arrestin Art2 is the
ubiquitylation-dependent endocytosis
Aurelio Heckert is released
of plasma membrane vitamin B1 transporters by Savocco
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.
et al. is released under a Creative Commons Attribution
License.
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1 A structural and #metoo caveat
Yes, access to knowledge has been (and continues to be) restricted by
wealth and privilege and geography and power and etc.
But for hundreds of years the fundamental logic of the scholarly life
has been to share.
A critical approach to the structures of education is required if we are to
serve what I have been asserting is a large part of the fundamental ethic of
the scholarly life. Read Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Pierre Bourdieu, and
many others – please get back to me when you’ve figured out it all out.
And of course there is #metoo. Richard Stallman’s treat-
ment of women throughout his career has been a vile
contribution to the toxic culture towards women in IT.
“Maha Bali” from Uncommon Women 2018 coloring book by Kelsey Merkleya is released under
a Creative Commons Attribution License.
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1 Alternate History of CC: Summary
So alternate tensions motivating CC might be, in ancient times:
scholarly tension scholarly
!
openness secrecy
tension
Pythagoras ! Euclid
and in modern times:
tension commercial
FLOSS !
software
In particular, the GNU Public License is a direct antecedent of [some of
the] Creative Commons licenses.
Whichever history you like, let’s talk now about the present.
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1.2 Creative Commons Today
Today, Creative Commons means (for us, at least) three things:
• a suite of licenses which give creators fine-grained control over the
uses which may be made of their works
• a global movement of “activists working on copyright reform around
the globe, policymakers advancing policies mandating open access to
research and data, and creators who share a core set of values. Most
of the people and institutions who are part of the CC movement are
not formally connected to Creative Commons.”
• a small, distributed non-profit which works to protect and promote
the licenses and to support the movement around the world.
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Unit 1 Break and Assignment
Take a five-minute break.
If you like, during the break, research and think about one of the following
things, to share back with the group [if you like] when we return:
• How many objects are under Creative Commons licenses at the
moment? [Hint: there exists something called the “State of the Commons report....”]
• Under what platform did Larry Lessig recently run for president?
• What did Richard Stallman have to say about “free beer?”
• Do you use any FLOSS? If so, are you some kind of weirdo?
• What is Maha Bali’s twitter handle, where does she blog and about
what topics?
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Unit 2. Copyright Law
The CC licenses derive their power from the powers of copyrights, so we
have to do a bit of a dive into copyright law. Some notes about our dive:
• This is not legal training, I am not giving you legal advice here, nor
will you be qualified to give legal advice after today’s workshop
(unless you have other legal training, qualifications, license, and etc.),
nor would you be qualified even if you did the full, 10-week CC
Certificate course. When answering your colleagues’ questions about
this stuff, you should say things like “I am not a lawyer ... but in
<this similar situation> I would be comfortable doing <something>
because <reasons>.”
• Intellectual Property [IP] lawyers are expensive, but screwing up can
be costly – e.g., what happened in Houston.
• Copyright law is to the scholarly life what medical malpractice law is
to the medical life... so learning a bit about copyrights is really useful
for us even if we don’t care about open licensing!
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Activity 2.1: Where is copyright?
For the next two minutes:
If possible, make a brand-new, copyrightable work – an original work
which could be copyrighted (in the United States) if you so chose. You
may use anything to which you have access, wherever you are: paper and
pen/pencil; laptop; phone with its audio and/or video recording capacities;
pipe-cleaners and modeling clay you may have around the house....
If it is not possible to create a copyrightable work under these
circumstances, write a few sentences, record a video, or otherwise fix in
some tangible medium your own original words describing why you cannot
do so.
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Discussion 2.1: Copyright is everywhere (in academia)
“...original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium...”6
“original” But very minimal originality suffices. E.g., your
vacation snaps are probably boring [I’m sorry to say]
but copyrightable7 .
“works of Also known as “expressions”, but definitely
authorship” not ideas [which however may be patentable].
Some devilish details: fictional characters are
copyrightable; recipes and theorems are not; some
plotlines are, others are scènes à faire and so
are not copyrightable....
“fixed ...” E.g., this is why there’s always a recorder going in
the back of a jazz club – now do you want to record
your presentations?
6
from §102 of the Copyright Act 17 U.S.C.
7
...probably ... but remember IAmNotALawyer and nothing in this presentation constitutes legal advice!
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Activity 2.2: How to get that “©”
For the next minute:
If possible, get, or at least, start the process of getting a legal copyright on
the work you just made. This may involve:
• adding some text to your work [then: do that], or
• going to a government website [use your phone or laptop: get the
URL to share with the class], or
• filling something out and mailing it [along with something else,
perhaps? make a packing list!] somewhere [get the form, or a link to
it, and the address, to share with the class], or
• something else?
If you must pay a fee as part of this process, wait at the place where
you have to enter in your credit card number, and we’ll all share that
in the discussion to follow.
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Discussion 2.2: The “©” is automatic!
Under the Berne Convention – originally signed in 1886; today it has 177
signatories and is overseen by the World Intellectual Property Organization
[WIPO]8 – copyright is “frictionless”, in that it springs into existence the
minute the work is fixed.
Of course, this only matters if your 9
work is created or consumed in one of
the countries colored blue here:
Conclusion: Nearly everything faculty, staff, and students create in
institutions of higher education is born in chains (of copyright).
For this reason, for academics not to know something about copyright
would be like a doctor who knows nothing of liability law....
8
Cory Doctorow says that WIPO “bears the same relationship to bad copyright law that Mordor has to evil in Middle Earth”
9
“The signatories of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works,” by User:Conscious was
released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
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Activity 2.3: What is copyright good for?
In the next minute, write down four things:
1. something you can do with a work whose copyright you own
2. something you can do with a work whose copyright you do not own
3. something you cannot do with a work whose copyright you own
4. something you cannot do with a work whose copyright you do not
own
Bonus round: What do time and space have to do with it?
Do any of your answers above change if you and the other party
involved – the copyright owner or person performing the dis/allowed
action – are separated in time and/or space? If so, by how much or
by what kind of border or line?
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Discussion 2.3: The uses of copyright
A copyright owner has the exclusive right to
• perform,
• display publicly,
• copy,
• distribute, and
• create derivative works from the copyrighted work,
or to authorize other parties to do so, for payment.
Some devilish details:
Is streaming the same thing as copying, legally? Because it is, technically.
Is putting a link to a work the same as copying or distributing it?
What constitutes a derivative work is tricky! Correct typos: no; translate: yes;
change file format: no; write a sequel: yes; put in anthology: no; etc.
In the OER/CC world, the concepts of a remix and a derivative work have an
... unfortunate relationship.
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Activity 2.4: Is copyright all-powerful?
Do you know of any limitations to copyright? Based on situation, time,
location, use...?
Two activities to explore that:
Think of (and write down) something a user could do with a copyrighted
work that the copyright owner might not like, but could prevent. (Your
examples may differ depending upon the kind of work being used and the
legal jurisdiction....)
Why did earlier slides talk about “copyright owners?” Is there any
difference between copyright owner and author/artist/creator ?
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Discussion 2.4.1: Limitations to copyright.
Works-for-hire: the copyrights to works produced as part of someone’s
employment belong to the employer, not the employee.
Academic exception-to-the-exception: Traditionally, academics are
exempt from the works-for-hire doctrine – but check your contracts!
US Federal exemption: works which would fall under the works-for-hire
doctrine with the US federal government as employer are automatically
free of copyright – they are born directly into the public domain.
Limited duration: the exclusive control vested in a copyright owner only
lasts for a finite period of time: in the US, 70 years after the death of the
author, the works “fall into the public domain.”10
10
The rules are more complicated for works-for-hire, and any work created before 1978.
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Discussion 2.4.2: A useful limitation to copyright.
“.. the Fair use 11 of a copyrighted work, including such use by
reproduction
..., for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching
(including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is
not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made
of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered
shall include –
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of
a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work.” §107 of the Copyright Act
11
a closely related concept in Commonwealth countries is called fair dealing there.
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Activity 2.5: Why all this copyright power?
Why would anyone set up a legal system which puts this kind of exclusive
control in the hands of copyright owners?
Take three minutes to come up with some reasons why such a
system might make sense.
You might classify your reasons as to whether they are utilitarian
[centered on the consequences – often economic – of actions] or
deontological [based on rules, often coming from an abstract notion of
the moral sanctity of the act of artistic creation].
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Discussion 2.5.1: The Founders had an answer
Copyright in the United States stems from Article I, Section 8 of the US
Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause 12 , which gives Congress the
power to enact laws
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Here, the Founders were following classical liberalism13 by assuming that
creators could be seduced to greater creative production of Science and
useful Arts by the lure of monopoly profits, for limited Times, coming from
their ownership of the intellectual property in their respective Writings and
Discoveries.
12
although it is also the source of the power to create patents and trademarks: all IP law, in fact!
13
Not to be confused the the more modern neoliberalism, which much more relentlessly thinks of everything in human life in
purely market terms and which is the “free-market fundamentalism” behind many of today’s problems in higher ed and beyond.
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Discussion 2.5.2: But the Founders were not academics
The [neo]liberal view of how to motivate creative activity is, I assert,
manifestly in tension with the longstanding14 values of the academic world,
in which world David Wiley’s 5Rs of Open, that anyone should be able to
Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute freely and without
seeking the creator’s permission, seem fundamental and self-evident.
So how can we deal with the automatic creation of restrictive and entirely
anti-academic copyrights?
This is exactly what Lessig and colleagues sought to do in founding the
Creative Commons organization and building the CC licenses.
The key legal idea here is to use the powers of copyright to subvert their
implications from within.
But that’s all the subject of the next Unit.
14
We’ve already seen what Pythagoras and Euclid have to do with this!
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Unit 2 Break and Assignment
Take a short break. During the break, here are some fun things to ponder:
• The Copyright Clause gives a very utilitarian justification for IP law.
Other countries emphasize instead the moral rights creators have
over their creations. Explain what you think this could be based on;
research on this topic would also be good, if you like [Hint: where do students go
for quick research?]. Which approach do you find more convincing, and why?
• Even the pure utilitarian explanation of copyright [in fact, all of IP
law] is based on a couple of empirical hypotheses about the world:
that creators will make more money by always exercising exclusive
rights over their works; and that society will get more creative works
by incentivizing their creators with the prospect of financial gain. Do
you think these hypotheses are always/often/sometimes true? Do you
know any related examples? Can you imagine other systems which
might achieve these same gains differently?
• Would you like to tinker with copyright law? If so, how?
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Unit 3. Anatomy of a CC License
Let’s continue the same active discussion as we move into how the
Creative Commons license suite responds to some of the above issues.
We’ll start by motivating the four license elements, and then describe the
resulting six complete license.
To those six licenses, we must then add a bit of discussion of CC’s Public
Domain Mark and Tool.
We must also talk a bit about how CC licenses operate with respect to
limitations and exceptions to copyright: see the “key legal idea” from
Discussion 2.5.2, two slides back.
Finally, we’ll mention some of the architecture of all the licenses in the
suite.
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Activity 3.1: The sine qua non of a scholarly IP system
Someone shout out the most fundamental required part of an
intellectual property system designed for use, re-use, remix, etc.
There are actually two sides to this:
producers of scholarly work: What do scholars most want to happen
with their work?
users of scholarly work: What do we insist of downstream users of
scholarly work? [This should be easy: we tell it to our students all the time,
use software systems to detect its violation, and discipline students when such
violations are detected.]
Take a minute to think through and write down some details of
this: Who would have to do what, when, including which components,
and in what format, to make this work?
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Discussion 3.1: BY is fundamental
All Creative Commons licenses begin “Creative Commons Attribution”
and have the icons and . The most basic license looks in situ like:
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
[Note that is not the license on these slides: it is merely shown here as an example.]
It is good form to put this license statement – with link to specific CC
license web page – on the title page or at least near the front of the work.
You may freely retain, reuse, redistribute, perform publicly, and create
derivative works of CC-BY works, but you must always give attribution.
Think of this as finally putting some legal teeth in the constant academic
refrain that appropriate credit must always be given to prior work: with
the BY license element, not only is plagiarism an academic impropriety, it
is actually illegal!
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Activity 3.2: Utilitarian and moral rights CC adjectives
Take a couple of minutes to think and/or collaborate on what
optional adjectives you might add to CC licenses [like “BY”] so users
could choose to retain some of the power of copyright.
As you do this, think about the why all that copyright power we discussed
in Activity 2.5, and try to take a maximalist stance for both the utilitarian
[probably via economics] and the moral rights perspectives.
When you think of the copyright power you might want to offer optionally
to preserve in CC licensing, make up a two-letter CC adjective which can
be added to license (after the basic “CC-BY”). Write down as much detail
about how that power would play out for both the creator and a user of
the licensed work.
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Discussion 3.2: NC and ND
The maximalist economic stance on the benefit of copyright is: the creator
wants any profits to be “mine, all mine.” Under CC-BY, the work will be
freely shared, so the best this maximalist can do is to insist that at least
no one else will make any money off of my work!
This is the NonCommercial license adjective, with icons , , or ,
depending upon jurisdiction.
The maximalist moral rights stance is: the creator doesn’t want anyone to
mess with their work. Under CC-BY, the work will be freely shared, so the
best this maximalist can do is to insist that at least my work will never be
changed – no derivative works will be made from my original!
This is the NoDerivatives license adjective, with icon .
[Note that since version 4.0, the ND adjective only requires that users may not distribute any
derivative works they make, since it is hard to control what they may do in private.]
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Activity 3.3: Maximalist on the power itself
Take a couple of minutes to think and/or collaborate on the
following:
Suppose the power of copyright goes to your head, and you want to use it
in a maximalist way ... but to do the good of one of the other CC license
adjectives. Think of an adjective which could work in conjunction with
those others to make the good last longer.
You may chose to use viral open-source software licenses, like the GNU
Public License [GPL] used in the GNU-Linux operating system, as
inspiration here.
Once again, make a two-letter CC adjective code for this idea and describe
how it works for creator and user in as much detail as possible.
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Discussion 3.3: Go viral with SA
The maximally controlling creator who is (perhaps somewhat
hypocritically) interested in freedom continuing into the future, might
insist that any derivative works which come from their work should be
shared with the same license as theirs was.
This is the ShareAlike license adjective, with icon .
Note that since SA is a requirement on how future creators will license
derivative works, it doesn’t make sense to combine SA with ND, since ND
does not allow derivative works to be distributed at all.
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3 Summary of all combined CC licenses
Here are the resulting possible Creative Commons licenses:
Let’s take turns each describing one of these licenses, saying for each one
• what uses it allows to the public,
• what restrictions it imposes along with those uses, and
• in which situations you might want to use that license.
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3 Why not go all the way to Public Domain?
If we’re so interested in giving others freedoms for our work, why not go
all the way to simply putting them in the public domain?
In the United States, a creator can simply choose to dedicate their work
“to the public domain,” after which they have no rights over that work
whatsoever (not even the right to be attributed when it is used). But this
is not possible in all countries in the world!
Therefore, the Creative Commons have crafted something called “CC0,
the public domain dedication tool.” CC0 puts a work immediately into the
public domain, in countries where that is possible. In countries where that
is not possible, it includes a “fall-back license” which amounts to giving
the rights of the public domain. It even has a final fall-back, in case the
first two steps don’t work, where the creator promises never to enforce any
remaining rights whatsoever over the work.
The corresponding icon is .
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3 One last icon
Sometimes [rarely] one sees the icon , called the Public Domain
Mark.
This is neither a license nor a tool, it is merely an indication that the
person distributing that work believes it to be in the world-wide public
domain.
You should be very careful about using this mark, and only apply it if you
are absolutely confident that what it asserts about the attached work is
true.
I could have put the Public Domain Mark on that image of The School of
Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, because I am very confident that a work
created by someone who died in 1520 is in the public domain.
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3 CC Licenses vs Limitations and Exceptions to Copyright
The power that a creator has to control what users do with their work
comes from copyright.
Hence, if copyright doesn’t apply, then the CC licenses can have no force.
• For example, a work which doesn’t qualify for copyright protection
cannot have a CC license.
• Likewise, only the copyright owner can put a CC license on a work.
• Also, a use of a work under one of the exceptions to copyright
restrictions does not have to follow any of the CC license provisions
on that work.
Think of and share some examples of all of the above situations!
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3 The Structure of All CC Licenses
All six of the CC licenses have the same over-all structure:
a three-layer design, depicted in this diagram −→
Here the layers are
1. The legal code contains the “lawyer-readable” terms
and conditions that are legally enforceable in court.
2. The commons deed consists of the web pages that lay out the key
license terms in “human-readable” terms. The deeds are not legally
enforceable but instead summarize the legal code.
3. The last layer is the machine-readable version of the license, written
in something called the CC Rights Expression Language [CC REL],
which is used by search engines and other automatic tools.
I used to be very scared of the legal code, but it’s not actually that bad –
now I like to look at it!
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Unit 3 Break ... and Assignment?
Take a short break. We’re probably all to tired for assignments at this
point, but how about
• Find some example pages on the web with various CC license icons.
• What CC license would you consider using for which of your own
works? Why?
• Are there other specialized restrictions you would like to be able to
use? What would those restrictions be? What would be a use case for
your new license clause?
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Creative Commons Licensing Workshop online, for CCD: 10 April 2020 41 / 69
Unit 4. Using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works
In this Unit, we’ll start by talking about how to choose a license, including
using the License Chooser, and putting enough information on your work
so that others can give you appropriate attribution.
This begs the very important question of how to give that attribution, for
which we have the convenient acronym TASL.
It’s important to note here that CC licenses are irrevocable, although the
creator can make uses of their CC-licensed work which seem to violate the
terms!
Finally, an issue which comes up very often in using CC-licensed works is
what are the constraints on remixing those works, perhaps in combination,
and what constitutes a remix as opposed to a “collection.” In this part, we
need to consider which licenses can be put on a remix, when different
works can even be remixed together, and what licenses can we put on a
collection. There will be some helpful charts for this technical material.
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4 Choosing and applying a CC license: the “Chooser”
We’ve discussed the various license features, so hopefully you are
somewhat comfortable with deciding which license to use. There is
perhaps still the matter of how you apply that chosen license.
Fortunately, the web page
creativecommons.org/choose
asks you some simple questions to make sure you are making the right
license choice for your purposes, and then gives you a beautiful statement
to attach to your creation showing which
license you have selected.
For example, if you were to go to that
page and make the choices I made for
these slides, the choose page would have
a bit that looks like this −→
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4 Choosing and applying a CC license: Always do this
In the example image on the previous slide, the part between “Have a
web page?” and “Copy this code to let your visitors know!” is crucial:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
There are several components to notice here:
• An icon indicating the license. While not a legal requirement, this is
really important to help users instantly know what license terms apply
to the work.
• Some standard language, including the name of the license. Again,
not a legal requirement, but clear language, preferably standard, is
also very helpful.
• The link to the creativecommons.org license text. This is legally
required; spell out the URL if true links are not possible in whatever
format you’re using.
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4 Choosing and applying a CC license: Also include this
You also want to include enough information in your works so that users
can give you proper attribution, required by all CC licenses!
Good attribution must follow the simple rule: TASL.
Title: What is the name of the work?
Author: Who owns the work?
Source: Where can it be found? (Provide link if possible.)
License: Which license is the work distributed under? (Provide link
to creativecommons.org license source.)
Therefore, what was missing from our licensing components, and implicitly
from what the license chooser web page builds for you, is that your work
should have a title and author shown somewhere.
[Well, anonymous works are possible, and you could use the URL or some
other description in place of a title, but that is usually not what the author
really wanted.]
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4 Changing your mind about a license, other permutations
It is important to remember that CC licenses are irrevocable. That is,
once you have put a work out into the world with a CC license on it,
anyone who finds a copy with that licensing statement can use it in the
ways permitted by the specific license, even if you have since changed your
mind.
In particular, no later statement on your part can change what legally can
be done with the first release.
That nevertheless does not prevent you from issuing another copy with a
different license statement, or even from using the work in ways that seem
impossible according to the license – like selling an NC-licensed work.
After all, you’re the copyright owner, you can do what you want with the
work and no one else would have legal standing to sue you.
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4 Remixes and collections
Some of the CC licenses allow downstream users to make adaptations/
remixes. Some do not.
Some allow remixing but restrict the licenses which the remixer can use on
their new work.
This is a practical issue that comes up all the time in the OER world, but
which a clear understanding of the license terms themselves should make
fairly straightforward.
It’s also important to distinguish between a few separate, unchanged works
put near each other, like a collection of poems, called a collection in this
context, and a true remix, perhaps of several works with different licenses.
We won’t discuss collections today, other than to say that licensing them
is actually quite easy, because you’re really just copying the original parts,
which is allowed by all CC licenses. You do have a very thin copyright just
in the choices you’ve made in your arrangement, as well as any new text
you create.
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Activity 4.1: Remixing CC Licensed Works
Say you want to make a remix15 of an existing work which has a CC
license or is in the public domain [maybe you’re adapting an OER!].
Fill out the following chart with a X/X if you may/mayn’t use the
specified adapter’s license on your remix, given the original work’s license.
16
15
in the CC world, the nouns remix, adaptation, and derivative work all refer to the same thing
16
adapted from “Adapter’s license chart” by Creative Commons, which was released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
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Discussion 4.1: Check Your Work
CC did this work for us, see their FAQ.
17
Here
means that is a permitted adapter’s license [i.e., it’s our “X”]
means it is technically permitted, but highly discouraged
means that is a forbidden adapter’s license [i.e., it’s our “X ”]
17
“Adapter’s license chart” by Creative Commons was released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
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Activity 4.2: Extra Credit
Say you want to make a remix combining two different original works.
Fill out the following chart with a X/X if you may/mayn’t make a
remix, with some license, given the original works’ licenses.
18
18
adapted from “Adapter’s license chart” by Creative Commons, which was released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
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Discussion 4.2: Check Your Own Damn Extra Credit
Come on, show some independence.
No, really, the idea is to use the Adapter’s license chart to see if there
exists any possible license which could be both an adapter’s license for
work A and for work B.
If so, that means your remix can combine those works and use that
common adapter’s license.
If not, there is no consistent way to put a single valid license on the
combined remix, so it is not a valid combination.
[If you are not confident in your work and cannot find me to have a conversation
about it, there is a filled-in chart in the CC FAQ.]
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Unit 4 Break ... and Assignment ... Really?
Take a short break.
We’re probably all too tired for assignments at this point, but how about
• Look up and describe to the class the famous “smoothie vs TV
dinner” metaphor of Nate Angell’s for remixes and collections. Why
do you think I don’t like the metaphor very much?
• It does bear some hard thought to look into those yellow boxes in the
chart above, although that is quite technical.
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Unit 5. Creative Commons for Educators/Librarians
The last unit of the CC Cert talks about practical issues for educators and
librarians who want to use open [CC] licenses.
For both groups, the issues of Open Access to scholarship [OA] and
Open Educational Resources [OER] are of interest, although perhaps in
different measures.
We’ll briefly talk about each of these topics, mentioning some definitions
and providing some resources, but mainly concentrating on connections to
CC licenses.
Let’s start with OER.
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5 Colorado’s legal definition of OER
HB18-1331, Higher Education Open Educational Resources, passed by
the Colorado General Assembly and signed by Governor Hickenlooper on
30 April 2018, defined OER here:
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
19
19
Closed based on the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s definition: “OER are teaching, learning, and research
resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use
and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming
videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
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5 Everybody’s practical definition of OER: the 5Rs
We’ve already mentioned20 David Wiley’s 5Rs, but since they are the
actual lived experience of most educators and librarians, it’s worth fleshing
out the details a bit more:
• Retain - to make, own, and control copies of the content
• Reuse - to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise - to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix - to combine the original or revised content with other open
content to create something new
• Redistribute - to share copies of the original content, your revisions,
or your remixes with others
20
Although, in addition to the reference cited before, see also The Access Compromise and the 5th R, by David Wiley,
released under CC BY 4.0
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5 Creative Commons licenses which support OER
Because of these 5Rs, or noting that free use or repurposing in
HB18-1331, we are left with only some of the possible Creative Commons
licenses as being fully compatible with OER... although there is clearly
room for some debate about exactly where the cut-off lies:
[From Open licenses by Alek Tarkowski, distributed under a CC-BY 4.0 license.]
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5 Finding and evaluating ... mathematics
As a grad student working on my thesis, I spent a few months diving
deeper and deeper into the mathematical literature. I was looking for just
the perfect papers which proved exactly the right lemmata, with exactly
the right hypotheses, which would help me take an important step for the
main result of my thesis.
This was hard because the mathematical literature is spread across many
journals, in many languages, distributed in many ways. There are some
central databases and repositories (Mathematical Reviews, Zentralblatt
MATH, arXiv.org, etc,), but it was not easy to find exactly what I wanted.
In the end, I found a few things I could use as is, and had to formulate and
prove the rest of those necessary pieces. [I guess that’s the point of doing
thesis in mathematics: it would be silly if it were just plugging together a
bunch of other people’s work like Lego pieces....]
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5 Finding and evaluating ... OER
In the same way, the perfect OER for some instructional situation can be
hard to find. Again, there are some (many) central searchable databases
and repositories, including, among many others
• OASIS • OpenStax
• OER Commons • The Open Textbook Library
• Merlot • LibreTexts
• Creative Commons’s OER page
Just as in my search for the perfect lemma, often there will not be a
perfect OER, just one which is pretty close. But under CC licenses21 ,
these can be modified by the users to be entirely perfect.
And, just as in my lemma search, the best – only! – true authority on the
quality and usefulness of each resource in the literature is the person who
will use it: the instructor, for OER.
21
without the ND clause
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5 Building community
One of the most wonderful things about the Open Education movement is
the wonderful, intersecting, supporting communities which contribute to it.
Here is just very small sample of ones you might like to join:
• CC Open Education Platform (invitation) • OER Forum
• International OER Advocacy • OER Discuss
• Open Knowledge Open Edu • Open Edu SIG
• Wikimedia Education • US OER Advocacy
• SPARC: Library OER • OE Global
• Open Textbook Network
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5 OER vs ZTC
One thing the community is somewhat divided on is whether the most
important thing, particularly in the US with its insanely high textbook
costs, about OER is their cost – typically, $0.
If cost were the primary driver in this movement, then we should probably
be talking about “Zero Textbook Cost [ZTC] courses,” rather than
“courses which use OER.”
This can be a particularly attractive perspective for funding entities such
as legislatures, because they are often concentrated on the return on
investment for their dollars spent, which is measured by total amount
students save – i.e., it only cares about cost.
In Colorado, for example, public institutions of higher ed are currently
competing to meet the Governor’s ZTC Challenge incentivizing a range of
activity from ZTC degree pathways to Z-Professors who use only free
textbooks in their classes.
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5 Open Pedagogy, or OER-Enabled Pedagogy, or...
On the other hand, the pedagogical academic freedom which OER
provides has lead to various approaches to pedagogy which are called open
pedagogy, OER-enable pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, etc. Some of
the brilliant folks working in this area include Maha Bali, Robin DeRosa,
Rajiv Jhangiani, Sean Michael Morris, and Jesse Stommel; see also The
Open Pedagogy Notebook. E.g., some of these authors talk about
disposable assignments that support an individual student’s learn-
assignments: ing but add no other value to the world and
renewable assignments that both support individual student learn-
assignments: ing and add value to the broader world. With renewable
assignments, learners are asked to create and openly li-
cense valuable artifacts that, in addition to supporting
their own learning, will be useful to other learners both
inside and outside the classroom.
[Although I confess I’m not sure I dislike “disposable assignments” as much as the name implies I should....]
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5 Open Pedagogy’s 5Rs
Rajiv Jhangiani’s blog post 5Rs for Open Pedagogy22 gives a new set of
Rs expressing the ideals that underpin his view of open pedagogy:
• Respect for the agency of students and creators including whether
they wish to perform public scholarship or not
• Reciprocate by not just drawing on but also contributing back to the
commons, by sharing resources, practices, and ideas
• Risk is ever present with open pedagogy
• Reach involves having an impact that extends well beyond the
classroom, a course, or a semester objectives.
• Resist against forces that conspire to pit increasingly precarious
faculty against increasingly precarious students. Resist against the
commodification of learning. Resist against the neoliberal university.
22
which he released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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5 Open Access
A good definition of Open Access [OA] from the Budapest
Open Access Initiative which says that OA means free...
“...availability on the public internet, permitting any users
to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to 23
the full texts of [research] articles, crawl them for indexing, pass
them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose,
without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those in-
separable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only
constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for
copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the
integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged
and cited.”
OA is therefore enabled and controlled by various CC licenses.
23
Open Access logo by PLoS made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
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5 Green and Gold OA
It’s useful in this context to know about the following terms, used widely
in discussion of Open Access:
Green OA: making a version of the manuscript freely available in a
repository. This is also known as self-archiving. An example
of green OA is a university research repository.
Gold OA: making the final version of the manuscript freely available
immediately upon publication by the publisher, typically by
publishing in an Open Access journal and making the article
available under an open license. Typically, Open Access
journals charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) when
an author wishes to (a) publish an article online allowing for
free public access and (b) retain the copyright to the article.
APCs range from $0 to several thousand dollars per article.
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Activity 5.1: What can you do NOW with CC licenses?
Take three minutes to think and/or collaborate on the following:
In order immediately to foster open education at your institution with the
help of Creative Commons licensing:
What can you do?
What can you help your colleagues do?
What can you help your students do?
Write a list of at least five specific actions you can take right away!
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Discussion 5.1: Some ideas for action
• Educate yourself, your students, your colleagues....
• CC-license all of your work, and use full attribution of others’
CC-licensed works.
• Share CC licensed material in editable form.
• Be aware of digital red-lining when using CC.
• Work to recognize OER in promotion and tenure at your institution.
• Work to make CC licenses the default on all documents produced by
your institution/organization which otherwise would have
all-rights-reserved copyrights.
• Help your institution fight exploitative deals with journal publishers.
• Boycott required payment 24 textbook schemes.
• etc., etc., etc.
24
absurdly called “inclusive access” by commercial publishers
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Resources
Creative Commons:
• main site: creativecommons.org
• FAQ: creativecommons.org/faq
• license chooser: creativecommons.org/choose
• marking your work with a CC license: on the CC wiki here.
• information on the fantastic25 on-line course leading to a Certificate
of Mastery in Open Licensing : certificates.creativecommons.org
Misc:
• the Open Attribution Builder from another state (Open Washington)
• my own Copyright Cheat Sheet for University Faculty
• my own Creative Commons Cheat Sheet for University Faculty
25
But I’m biased: I’ve taken the course, become a Master, and now instruct it – sign up and maybe you’ll be in my section!
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Unit 5 Assignment ... Come on...
We’re pretty much at the end, if we take a break we might not come back.
Instead, let’s just jump to...
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∞ Questions, Comments, and Contact Info
Questions? Comments?
Email (feel free!): jonathan@poritz.net ; Tweety-bird: @poritzj .
Get these slides at poritz.net/j/share/CCLWS4CCD.pdf and all files for
remixing26 at poritz.net/j/share/CCLWS4CCD/ .
If you don’t want to write down that full URL, just remember
poritz.net/jonathan/share
or poritz.net/j/share
or poritz.net/jonathan [then click Always SHARE]
or poritz.net/j [then click Always SHARE]
or scan −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→
[then click Always SHARE]
Also, tons of useful stuff at the OER site of the Colorado Department of
Higher Education masterplan.highered.colorado.gov/oer-in-colorado/ .
26
subject to CC-BY-SA
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