Navigating Licenses
Creative Commons Licenses
To use and create open content, it is important to develop an understanding of Creative Commons (CC) and Ontario Commons (OCL) licenses to support searching, adapting, remixing, and sharing resources.
Creative Commons (CC) is an international non-profit organization that promotes the sharing and reuse of works by providing free legal tools. Its main product are the six open licenses.
A Creative Commons license consist of three elements:
- CC logo or initials
- icons representing a combination of conditions
- version (4.0 International is the most recent).
The six Creative Commons licenses are a combination of four conditions. These are represented by two letters – CC BY-SA – or written out in long form – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.
- Attribution (BY)
- ShareAlike (SA)
- NonCommercial (NC)
- NoDerivatives (ND)
Infographic Long Description
The Creative Commons Licenses are ordered from those that require little or no attribution, to those that have more restrictions.
CC0 is a public domain dedication. It means that no attribution or credit for the original author is needed. You can adapt it any way you wish and even use it commercially.
CC BY means that you must give credit (attribution) to the original author. You can adapt and use it commercially if you wish. However, attribution is not negotiable.
CC BY-SA is a CC BY license plus “Share Alike.” This means that you must attribute it and share any adaptations you make with the same CC BY-SA license.
CC BY-NC is CC BY plus “Non-Commercial” which means that you can use it with attribution, you can adapt it, but you cannot sell it or profit from it except to recuperate costs of printing for example.
CC BY-NC-SA is CC BY plus “Non-Commercial” plus “Share Alike,” which means that you can use it with attribution, you can adapt it, but you cannot sell it or profit from it and you must share it again using CC BY-NC-SA.
CC BY-ND is CC BY plus “No Derivatives” which means that you can use it with attribution but you cannot adapt it.
CC BY-NC-ND is CC BY plus “Non-Commercial” plus “No Derivatives” meaning you can use it with attribution, you cannot adapt it, and you cannot sell it or profit from it except to recuperate costs of printing for example.
Video: 6 Creative Commons Licenses
For a quick review of the six CC licenses, we invite you to watch this short video produced by the University of Guelph.
What are Creative Commons Licenses (1:14) [CC BY-NC-SA]
Video Transcript
This video will introduce you to Creative Commons licenses, which make copyright easier to understand. Let’s say you create something. This thing could be creative, like a picture of your cat, or scholarly, like an essay about cats. Because you are the creator of this picture or essay, copyright allows you to decide what people can do with your creation. When you are the copyright holder, people have to ask you for permission before putting your cat picture into a PowerPoint or adapting your cat essay into a movie. Getting permission can be time consuming and complicated for both the creator and the user. This is where Creative Commons can help. Creative Commons exists to make permissions explicit and straightforward. Creative Commons licenses use icons and simple language so that creators can make their intentions clear and users can be certain that their use of a work is legal. These different licenses help people understand if and how they can use, share, or build on a work. This icon means that only non-commercial uses are permitted, so no one can profit from using your picture. This icon means that no one can make changes to the original work, such as photoshopping a dog into your cat picture. This icon means that someone can change your work but their version must be shared under the same license as yours. All Creative Commons licenses give credit to the original creator, preserving your reputation as a creative genius while the world engages with your work. Licenses can be attached to most things, including blog posts, images, artworks, journal articles, and more! To learn more about Creative Commons licenses, visit the Creative Commons website or check out some of the other videos in our series.
The most open of these licenses is CC BY, requiring attribution only. The most restrictive (but still more open than copyright’s “all rights reserved” approach) is CC BY-NC-ND, which requires attribution but does not allow for commercial use and adaptations.
Resources with the ND condition are technically not OER. ND indicates that the user cannot make changes to the original version to incorporate into a new resource. This condition goes against two of the five Rs: revising and remixing. For disciplines with few OER, using non-modifiable resources is still a viable option. If no modifications are made, they can be assigned without having to request additional permission.
Creative Commons also makes available to creators the CC0 designation. It is not a license, but rather a tool that allows creators to waive their rights and transfer their recent works directly into the public domain. A work in the public domain has no copyright restrictions and can therefore be used freely and openly, even without attribution.
Generally, CC licenses are easy to find when you search for resources in an OER repository. However, sometimes the licenses are not as obvious on resources you find on the open web (blogs, websites, videos, etc).
Video: Finding and Interpreting Open Licenses
The following video will help you find and interpret open licenses associated with blogs, websites and videos.
Finding and Interpreting Open Licences (2:12) [CC BY]
Video Transcript
In this video you will learn about finding open licenses. How to find them on different websites and how to interpret them. In addition to searching for resources in OER repositories, you can find millions of OERs on the open web. Blogs, websites, and videos can all have open licenses and they are easy to find through a Google search. What can be tricky on the open web is finding and interpreting the licenses and terms of use. Let’s take a look at different examples. This article is on a blog. Let’s say I want to post the text of this article in my online course. When looking for license information, I generally scroll to the bottom of the page. If the CC license is listed, I will click into it to read the terms to be sure of the use. This license clearly states that I can reproduce and remix the material as long as I do the following: provide attribution. There are also examples where the license for the item may be buried. This article on a web magazine has the license at the end of the article, rather than the bottom of the webpage. This example has both a copyright symbol and CC license. To understand this statement – think of a copyright statement that says “all rights reserved.” The copyright statement that includes a CC license is saying explicitly who the copyright holder is and that they have chosen to only reserve “some rights”. And they indicate the rights in the license that they have applied. So, as in the previous example, follow the CC license guidelines. Let’s also look at a video example. You will generally find YouTube Creative Commons licenses under the “Show More” link. You can also look for license information at the end of the video. If you don’t see a Creative Commons license, look for other licenses or a “terms of use” link. Follow the links to learn about the terms for the site. And if you don’t see any license information you assume it is copyright with all rights reserved. If you still aren’t sure, email the creator or check in with the copyright office at your institution.
Ontario Commons Licenses
Some OER created with the financial support of eCampusOntario’s Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS) have an Ontario Commons license: OCL 1.0 or OCL-ND 1.0. The former is comparable to CC BY-NC while the latter is like CC BY-NC-ND, but with additional restrictions.
The main difference with Creative Commons is that they apply only to educators and students in the Ontario post-secondary sector. Other users may need permission from the copyright holder to use resources with an Ontario Commons license. They are more restrictive than Creative Commons licenses.
Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels
There is a long history of appropriation of Indigenous and traditional knowledge resulting from the application of copyright law. For example, the criteria of fixation in a tangible medium is especially problematic for cultures heavily based on oral traditions. This has led to non-Indigenous researchers owning the copyright on songs performed by Indigenous peoples simply by recording them.
Because open licenses work with these notions of copyright, they may not be the appropriate tool to manage, share and protect Indigenous knowledge.
Local Contexts offers a set of Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels that “allow [Indigenous] communities to express local and specific conditions for sharing and engaging in future research and relationships in ways that are consistent with already existing community rules, governance and protocols for using, sharing and circulating knowledge and data.”
The TK Labels fall into three categories:
- Provenance Labels
- Protocol Labels
- Permission Labels
Find out more about each label on the Local Contexts website.
If you plan on incorporating Indigenous knowledge in an open educational resource, please review The 6Rs of Indigenous OER to find out how to respect community protocols and ethical considerations.
Activity: Understanding Open Licenses
Assess your understanding of open licenses by completing this H5P activity.
