Understanding Creative Commons

Title	Understanding Creative Commons
Overview	Open source applies to more than just software, and the Creative Commons family of licenses provide a good solution for open sourcing creative works. This module helps students understand the purpose of Creative Commons licenses and be comfortable with the different license choices available.
Prerequisite Knowledge	Students should be familiar with the basics of copyright.
Learning Objectives	Student should be able to choose, apply, and understand how to comply with a Creative Commons license.

Background:

* Want to let people share and use your photographs, but not allow companies to sell them?
* Looking for access to course materials from the world’s top universities?
* Want to encourage readers to re-publish your blog posts, as long as they give you credit?
* Looking for songs that you can use and remix, royalty-free?

If you answered 'yes' to any of the questions above, then you should learn more about Creative Commons.
-- About - Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that was created to provide a set of copyright licenses for creative works. Specifically, these licenses are intended to provide the legal framework so that others can easily use, share, and build upon the creative works.

[This video https://vimeo.com/13590841] provides a quick 3 minute overview of Creative Commons.

Each (current) Creative Commons license has a set of base rights, specifically:

• ensuring that the author's copyright on a work is retained
• requiring that the authorship of a work be attributed
• allow others to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide

These set of base rights make up the Creative Commons Attribution license (known as CC-BY). It allows for people to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and make derivative works based on it, as long as they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner they specify. Creative Commons provides a [human readable summary of CC-BY http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/] as well as [the actual legal license text http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode]. They do this for each of their licenses. Students should be encouraged to read the summary as well as the "legalcode" and consider how they are similar, but different.

There are a number of additional rights and restrictions that can be applied to the base rights:

• Share-Alike (SA) - This requires that if you make and distribute a derivative work, you must do so under a license identical to that applied to the original work. To put it simply, if you make a change to a Creative Commons work with the SA clause, your work must also be under that same Creative Commons license (with the same clauses).
• Non-Commercial (NC) - This restricts the permissions to copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative copies of the Creative Commons work only for noncommercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works (ND) - This removes the permission to make derivative works from the Creative Commons work.

The ND and SA clauses are mutually exclusive, so this means there are six possible licenses:

License	Acronym	Human-readable explanation	Legal code
Creative Commons Attribution	CC BY	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial	CC BY-NC	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike	CC BY-SA	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives	CC BY-ND	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike	CC BY-NC-SA	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives	CC BY-NC-ND	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

Creative Commons provides a useful license chooser tool on their website: http://creativecommons.org/choose/ The tool also generates an attribution statement (and license logo) to help other people be aware of the license and understand how to properly attribute. Keep in mind that all Creative Commons licenses require attribution, which means that if you use a Creative Commons work in any of the ways permitted by the license, you must provide the name of the creator (or owner), a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the original material. The actual method of doing this is left up to you, as long as it is "reasonable" and does not suggest that the original creator (or owner) endorses you or your use.

There are many good ways to find Creative Commons licensed materials, and most of these are listed at http://search.creativecommons.org/

What is the rational for this activity?

Include helpful hints to faculty here.

Directions:

What should the student do?

1. Choose the right license for these situations A) B) C) D) E) F)

2. Make and present a short "lightning talk" presentation that utilizes creative commons licensed works, on a topic of their choice. Be sure that they correctly comply with the terms of the license(s)!

Deliverables:

What will the student hand in?

Assessment:

How will the activity be graded?

How will learning will be measured?

Include sample assessment questions/rubrics.

Comments:

What should the instructor know before using this activity?

What are some likely difficulties that an instructor may encounter using this activity?

Additional Information:

Knowledge Area/Knowledge Unit	Social Issues and Professional Practice (SP) / Intellectual Property
Topic	Intellectual property rights
Level of Difficulty	Is this activity easy, medium or challenging?
Estimated Time to Completion	How long should it take for the student to complete the activity?
Materials/Environment	What does the student need? Internet access, IRC client, Git Hub account, LINUX machine, etc.?
Author	Tom Callaway
Source	Is there another activity on which this activity is based? If so, please provide a link to the original resource.
License	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Suggestions for the Open Source Project:

Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License