Open = Free + Permission

In this chapter, we are going to take a deeper dive into Creative Commons licensing. The resources I’ve been looking for have been from CreativeCommons.org and its Director of Open Education, Dr. Cable Green. I’m happy to share some of the key takeaways for me.

First, in Green’s presentation, he mentions that Open is not the same as Free. While most materials, images, videos that are on the internet are free in the accessible sense they are still protected by the invisible “all rights reserved” mantra of copyright law. However by using open licenses they give us the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and/or redistribute and work with copyright law rather than against it. Simply put Green says, “Open = Free + Permissions”.

As I was reviewing the other licenses, the other thought I had was the urgency to be better at attributing myself. In all of the CC license types, there is one shared element which is the “BY” attribution component. Looking back at previous work that I wanted to be open; I noted that I didn’t make it clear to others what they needed if they chose to use my work. Green nicely puts that information into the following list:

  • Title of the material
  • Author
  • Source of the material (URL)
  • License
    • Name + Link (for example CC BY linked to https://creativecommons.org/lincenses/by/4.0)

I also had felt the overwhelming feeling of trust. As far as I can tell there is no easy way to monitor how your work is used. When I tried to look at strategies most of the shared experience’s involved someone else reporting the violation to the creator. So the lesson here is to make your attribution clear and hopefully this way others can help you.

The last thought I had from this week’s material was to learn the usefulness of each license and don’t feel restricted to just one type. I’m fairly basic when it comes to licensing I have the habit of just picking the top tier “BY” license.  It’s important to give it some thought. In one of the articles, it mentions briefly that once you apply for a license it can become difficult to reel it back in. Currently, as I’ve thought about my work I may be more prone to choose a BY SA or BY NC.

So this week for my creation I thought I would revisit the Creative Commons license and do an activity that helps align the 5R actives (Retain, Revise, Remix, Reuse, Redistribute) with the Six CC Licenses (“BY”, “BY SA”, “BY NC”, “BY NC SA”, “BY ND”, “BY NC ND”).
Before you take on this next activity, please review the following presentation from David Wiley: “OER, the 5Rs, and Creative Commons“

Resources:

License

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Open Pedagogy: Learn, Create, Share Copyright © 2020 by Lance Roe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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