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Creative Commons 4 Educators

Course Material

Case Study 1

Jessica Coates's picture
Tue, 2011-01-04 08:49

Topics: finding CC material; identifying the licence; identifying your rights and responsibilities; jurisdiction issues; different licence versions; legal deed v legal code

Due Date: 7 February 2011

Overview
Often copyright seems like a major barrier to educators, with rules that are complex and ill-designed for the modern classroom environment. Teachers often feel frustrated and uncertain whether the use they want to make is legal.

The simpliest way to get around this is to get permission from the copyright owner. You can always use material anyway you like as long as you have permission, usually in the form of a licence. It is this principle that has led to the growing open access movement, of which Creative Commons is one of the most significant players. Creative Commons and other open access organisations aim to create a pool of legally reusable material by making it easier for copyright owners to share their material with others, should they so choose. This is achieved by providing broad licences that creators can apply to their material to give permission in advance for certain uses.

This case study aims to help you find and identify Creative Commons material, and to recognise the basic features of each of the Creative Commons licences.

Case Study
Raphael is a primary school teacher in Italy. He wants to find some images he can use in his classes. He has heard that Creative Commons is a good source of reuseable material, but doesn't know much about how it works.

He goes to the Creative Commons website at http://creativecommons.org and, using the Creative Commons search page (http://search.creativecommons.org/) to look for transport, he finds these photos:

Questions:

Note: If you need additional information to answer any of these questions, identify that information in your answer and note how it would influence your responses.

  1. What is the licence on each of the works Raphael has identified?
  2. How is Raphael allowed to use each of the images? What steps must he take to comply with each licence?
  3. What other methods could Raphael have used to find CC licensed photographs?
  4. One of the works is under a Creative Commons Australian licence. Can Raphael use this material in Italy?
  5. Some of the images are under a version 2.0 licence, while others are under a version 2.5 or 3.0 licence. Does this change what Raphael can do with the images? Briefly explain the effect of licence versions.
  6. Find a CC licensed photograph, song and text work. Identify how you found them and what their licence is.
  7. Using the Creative Commons licence chooser (http://creativecommons.org/choose/), find the legal code of the latest licences for the jurisdiction of each of your group members. If your jurisdiction does not have a version, use the unported licence. What version are they up to? What rights does the legal code of the Attribution licence grant users?

Reading and Resources

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