Fair Use and the Creative Commons

Fair Use of Content and the Creative Commons: Copyright and the Internet

A Creative Commons license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use and build upon a work that they have created. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_Attribution_License

We have always been instructed on copyright laws and the necessity of crediting the work and resources we use in both our teaching and our learning, but publishing is no longer confined to bound books or even recordings and videos tapes. Everyday a multitude of images, texts and video are uploading to the internet for millions of people to view, critic, and possibly reuse, repin or repurpose.  It is important that we learn how to not only properly accredit information we glean from the internet, but also to protect what we ourselves are posting on our blogs, websites and social media sites.

As educators we must inform our students about Fair Use of Content and lead by example.  Many school boards purchase licensing agreements and there are a number of ‘free’ sites from which students can pull images.  Just like any resource for an assignment, all information and images retrieved from, or reposted on, the internet should be properly documented according to the attribution or copyright of the site. 

The Creative Commons Attribution Licence has been developed to address the fair use of content on the internet.  Many sites, such as Flickr, make use of Creative Common Attribution, which allows users to decide how others may use their uploaded content.  Just like any copyright law though, there is a level of personal responsibility, ethics and morality that must be in place.  As educators, and leaders in education, it is our responsibility to inform our students and colleagues about fair use policies.  Just like the rules and regulations for photocopying are posted in the mailroom, so should the conventions of the Creative Commons be posted in the computer lab. 

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The Six Licences that allow for sharing of content.  Of course, one can also maintain “All rights reserved” to restrict any sharing, revising or reposting of information.

The following italicized infomation has been taken directly from the Creative Commons Attribution Website :  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

The Licenses

Attribution 
CC BY

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.

Attribution-ShareAlike 
CC BY-SA

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 license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NoDerivs 
CC BY-ND

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial 
CC BY-NC

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, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 
CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 
CC BY-NC-ND

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Of course this also raises the question of posting student work on-line.  Who created the assignment? Who created the finished product? Is it an image of a work or art?  Or set task confined by the parameters of the creator of the task? Are you publishing a student’s text online? Do you need permission to post the work?  If the student is no of the legal age of majority do you have to ask for parental permission to post the work?  Does is matter if it is a completely public site or a post with privacy limitations? What about all those papers parents sign at the beginning of the year concerning internet use and permission to photograph?  Should there be a clause about permission to post student work on line? Is there such a clause included on any of the Board or individual school permission forms already? 

Lots of questions to ponder, and honestly I’m not really sure. For years, teachers have photographed or kept student work to use as examples, and probably with little if any thought to the creative ownership. The internet has opened up the audience of such samples from a few classes of children and some staff members to endless numbers of people. It can depend greatly on the type of site and attribution licence of that site as student work is posted on the web.  We need to educate ourselves not only on the use of copyrighted material from the web, but also on Creative Commons Attribution Licencing concerning what we, and our students/colleagues,  are posting on the internet as well.