LibGuides: Open Education Resources (OER): Copyright & Open Licenses

What does it mean to be openly licensed?

What sets open resources apart is the "open" license, which enables two key features:

OER can be legally shared, copied, and distributed, so anyone can access the material in a wide range of print and digital formats at little or no cost, without fear of expiration dates.
The open materials can be legally adapted by instructors, which makes it possible to add new material, change terminology, or remove unnecessary components so the resource perfectly fits an educator’s needs.

Open licenses do not replace copyright; they work with copyright law to change the default setting from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved." Under U.S. law, copyright is the exclusive right to dictate how users copy, distribute and adapt a work. By default, all of those rights are reserved by the author, and anyone who wants to use it needs to get permission from the author in the form of a license. Open licenses are a particular kind of license that enable authors to grant blanket permissions to everyone, which makes it much easier for people to legally use the material in the ways the license allows.

Adapted from Open Education Primer by SPARC Open Education Leadership Program licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Available at sparcopen.org/leadership-program

Open Licenses

Creative Commons
The most popular of open licenses. CC licenses allow creators to explain in plain language how their works can be used by others.
Free Art License
The FAL “grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works without infringing the author’s rights.” It is meant to be applied to artistic works, not documents.
GNU Free Documentation License
A copyleft license that grants the right to copy, redistribute, and modify a resource. It requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may be sold commercially, but the original document or source code must be made available to the user as well.

Public Domain

Works that are no longer protected by copyright are considered part of the public domain. Items in the public domain can be reused freely for any purpose by anyone, without giving attribution to the author or creator (though standard citation procedures apply).

Public domain works in the U.S. include works whose creator died 70 years prior, works published before 1924, or works dedicated to the public domain by their rights-holder. The Creative Commons organization created a legal tool called CC 0 to help creators dedicate their work to the public domain by releasing all rights to it.

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
This chart from Cornell guides users through the process of determining a work's US public domain status.

Adapted from The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Available https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/oerstarterkit/chapter/copyright/