Today's Hours:
By Keila Santa '25
On Friday, April 18th, Scholarly Communications Librarian Rebecca Dowgiert hosted a webinar where she spoke about all things copyright–including licensing, author’s rights, and the most common exceptions to these rules. In case you missed it, here is the overview!
What is Copyright? In short, if you create a fixed, tangible expression of an idea, it is automatically considered copyrighted. This means that it becomes your intellectual property, and only you have the right to copy, distribute, perform, display, adapt, or make money from it unless otherwise stated. Copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus 70 years.
Copyright Licenses:
So what is a copyright license then? Well, a copyright license allows someone else to use your work. You can grant them a license to use it in one or more ways that normally only you would have the right to do. Generally, these licenses cost money, but you can also share your works without charging anything and still be known as the person who created it. This is where Creative Commons and Open Licenses come into play.
Creative Commons and Open Licenses are free, online, legal tools that make it easy for authors to voluntarily give up some of their copyrights. Since not everyone wants to give up the same copyrights, there are six Creative Commons license choices created from modular elements:
CC (creative commons), plus BY (attribute the author)
& maybe one or more of the following elements:
To learn about each of the Creative Commons license options, click here
Once you choose a CC Open License, you must clearly label your work with it. Since it is online, the license statement should have live links or the printed out URL to the author’s website (if it exists), the website containing the work, and a link that leads directly to the Creative Commons website page containing the specific license’s terms. It’s important to remember that once a work is licensed under a CC license, you cannot revoke or “take back” that license even if you later change your mind.
Every CC license, except the two that include the “ND” element, let you edit the work in any way you’d like. If/when you've changed enough, it becomes a “derivative” new work, meaning you can now license it as your new work as long as you follow the license term that says to attribute (credit) where the material you changed came from. If the original material’s license includes the element “SA”, your license will have to be the same as the one on the original material.
Rebecca highlighted that this editing freedom became a game changer for education since faculty were now able to take openly-licensed, free textbooks, and edit them! This could mean updating the facts, making the information more accessible, making it more inclusive, customizing it for your county/state/region, or even mixing two or more open textbooks together. Faculty may also have students making or editing an open textbook, or adding quiz and text question banks and other ancillaries over time, making it constantly-evolving!
Author’s Rights:
Author’s rights are essentially just a creator’s copyrights. An author keeps these rights unless…
or
When it comes to the publishing of scholarly articles, academics do not receive money (such as book ‘royalties’) directly for having their articles published in academic journals. However, this is compensated for by the opportunities they may get from the exposure—such as jobs, tenureship, more grant funding to do their research, and overall recognition and a better reputation.
Exceptions to Copyright Law:
Why do we need exceptions? Well, if there was no way to be able to use some of what is currently copyrighted, it would be nearly impossible to engage with materials through learning, critiquing, news reporting and more, without infringing on the law in some way.
The most common exception that most people are familiar with is Fair Use. Fair use is an integral part of copyright law that allows for certain uses of copyrighted materials without the author's permission (bits of information, images, video clips, etc.). However, to do Fair Use correctly, you must cite correctly. Not citing a source is a big academic honesty/ethics issue, and it is also theft of intellectual property, AKA plagiarism.
The thing that can make Fair Use tricky is that there are no hard or fast rules. Instead, there are four factors that decide what is considered Fair Use: nature, amount, use, and effect on market. If an author notices that you borrowed stuff from them and is unhappy with how you used their materials, they may sic their lawyers on you, or even attempt to sue you in civil court. For more information on each of the factors, click here for a breakdown by the Copyright Alliance.
Some other exceptions to Copyright Law include:
Thank you to Rebecca for hosting and putting together this informative webinar! If you want to read more about how open licenses have impacted education, check out our previous post on Open Educational Resources.
Image: https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-copyright-image1682597- Kostyantine Pankin
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