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Copyright, Creative Commons, & Fair Use

Licensing Copyrighted Works

Licensing Copyrighted Works

Copyright holders can set terms for how their works are used through the granting of licenses. A license may transfer all or only some of the copyright holder rights under certain conditions which may include a fee, royalties, a set amount of time, or for a specific use. 

Using copyrighted works without a licenses is considered infringing on the rights of the copyright holder and can result in legal action being taken by the copyright holder. Under U.S. copyright law, the burden of defending copyright falls to the rights holder whether it's an individual creator, publisher, company, or institution like a university.

Licensing may be done through the publisher or a company that specializes in licensing. Or a creator may choose to apply a Creative Commons license to their work.

Creative Commons (CC)

About Creative Commons

Founded in 2001, Creative Commons allows creators to apply more flexible copyright licenses to their works that allow for reuse, adaptation, and remixing. This was a direct response to the ease of sharing information on the internet, where some creators felt a traditional "all rights reserved" copyright was too restrictive.

Creative Commons is not the absence of copyright. Creative Commons is a licensing system that allows the rights holder to specify how the work may be reused without having to field individual license requests.

Creative Commons Licenses

These are the four basic building blocks of the CC license. They can be combined to provide various levels of access depending on the creators wishes:

Attribution:
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Noncommercial:
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial,

No Derivative Works:
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you

Share Alike:
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.  This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Adapted from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ and http://libguides.nyit.edu/c.php?g=61923&p=398321

More on Creative Commons

Open Access

Open Access refers to materials that are created and shared free of cost. This includes articles, books, journals, and other resources.

Open Access does not mean copyright free or public domain, though many authors and publishers who make their work open access often apply Creative Commons licenses to the work.

If a Creative Commons license is applied, it will specify the conditions for reuse. If a Creative Commons license is not applied, assume that the creator retains all rights granted under copyright law.