Copyright and open licensing lay at the heart of Open Educational Resources, so to fully be able to work with OER, and to create your own, a basic understanding of these terms is needed.

On this page, we provide some basic information on what copyright and the public domain are, what open licenses do in relation to these terms, and give an overview of the most common type of open licenses: Creative Commons licenses.

Beyond defining copyright for the purpose of explaining what open licenses are, this guide does not provide a full overview of copyright law in the Netherlands.

Furthermore, we will not provide further instructions on how to work with copyright protected materials in your courses. If you want to know how to properly use such materials in your courses, please visit the webpage of the University of Groningen's Copyright Information Point. If you have specific questions regarding the use of copyright-protected materials, you can reach the Copyright Information Point via e-mail: copyright@rug.nl.
 

Copyright and copyright protections

The concept of copyright was created to shield creators of original works against misuse of that work. Copyright on an original work grants several protections to the copyright holder, essentially giving them the right to determine if, how, and when their copyright-protected works may be used by others. If someone violates these rights, there can be legal consequences, often in the form of fines.

Copyright emerges automatically when a work is created, and the first copyright holder of a work is the creator of the work. However, copyright can be transferred to a different party, and this often the case. Publishers often hold the copyright for works they have published and distributed, and employers often stipulate in their contracts that the copyright of works created by employees are transferred to them. In the first case, the transferral of copyright is often a conscious decision by the creator, but in the second case, this transferral occurs automatically, as it has been agreed upon when the employee signed their contract. The automatic transferral of copyright to the employer is the case for most educational resources created by employees of the University of Groningen. The copyright on research materials however continues to be held by the researcher.
 

The public domain

Sometimes, a creator of a work can give up the copyright attached to their work, and make it part of the public domain. Another way for works to become part of the public domain is simply by age: in the EU, works become part of the public domain 70 years after the death of the creator of the work.

Works in the public domain have no copyright holder anymore, and as such, there are no protections granted by copyright to the holders. This means that all works in the public domain can be freely kept, distributed, and altered. Furthermore, no credit needs to be given to the original creator of the material, and if the work has been made public by conscious decision of the original creator, this decision cannot be reversed.
 

Open licenses

Copyright protected works and the public domain works represent the two ends of the spectrum of rights attached to a work: "all rights reserved" for copyright-protected materials, and "no rights reserved" for public domain works. 

In between these two ends of the spectrum fall openly licensed works. Openly licensed works still have a copyright holder, but this copyright holder has determined that the work they hold copyright over can be used in certain ways without prior permission. In essence, the rights determining how the work can be used are very relaxed, but not gone. Generally, copyright holders use open licenses to state that explicit permissions or payments are not needed to engage with the work in particular ways. Open licenses represent the middle section of the above-mentioned spectrum, with some licenses almost relaxing every right (only requiring attribution), and some being a bit more strict (prohibiting commercial uses or the creation of derivative works). The image below showcases the spectrum of rights and shows how OER fit into this spectrum.

The copyright holder of an openly licensed work can decide to change the license attached the work at a later point in time, but in practice, this can only be done to make the work more open. New licenses that prohibit previously allowed actions can only apply to the new version of the work with the more restrictive license, but older (copied) versions of the work with a more open license can still operate under the permissions set by the more open license.

Image taken from the presentation OER Basics by Kelsey Smith - licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 International License

There are many different types of (open) licenses, and often you can quite easily find more information on how you are allowed to use works found online in a website's Terms of Use/Service, Copyright, or About section. However, often you will find that OER repositories or search engines present many educational resources with differing licenses. As such, familiarity with the most commonly found open licenses, the Creative Commons licenses, is beneficial. Creative Commons licenses are easily recognizable by this logo:

Creative Commons licenses are built on 4 additions, which may impose several restrictions on people who want to use your work. Generally, the less additions you add to your license, the more open your material. Nevertheless, at least one addition (the attribution addition) is always present, as otherwise the work would have no boundary requirements attached to it, making it a public domain work. The table below shows an overview of the four additions to Creative Commons licenses. 

Addition	What does it mean?
Attribution (BY)	People who use your licensed work are required to provide attribution to you
Non Commercial (NC)	People who use your licensed work may not use it for commercial ventures
No Derivative Works (ND)	People who use your licensed work may not change any aspect of it, or may not add new material to it to create a new work
Share-like (SA)	People who adapt your work in any way are required to share it under a similar license as you have put on the work

As noted, the BY addition is present in all Creative Commons licenses, meaning that proper attribution always need to be given. For more information on how to give proper attribution, you can check our guide on ways to use OER in teaching.

These four additions, with the attribution addition being always present, can be remixed into six different types of licenses. Often, the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license is the license used by the University of Groningen for the sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER), though teachers are generally free to choose what license to apply to their OER.

With the information in this guide, we hope you now have a better understanding of what copyright, the public domain, and open Creative Commons licenses are. If you need more support or have questions regarding the copyright status of a specific resources and the things you are (not) allowed to do with that resource, you can reach the OER support services at: oer-library@rug.nl, and the copyright information point at: copyright@rug.nl.

In our other guides, we outline what OER are, reasons for why OER can/should be used in teaching, where you can find suitable OER yourself, how you can implement any found OER in your teaching, how you can create your own OER, and how you can share your own work as an OER with the world.