On a daily basis an academic can deal with one of three scenarios: Reprographic licensing Publishing research Sharing course materials In this session, we will concentrate on scenario 3. For more information on reprographic licensing – see: http://education-copyright.org/reprographic-reproduction-rights-licensing/

Academics share materials in various ways such as on a Vula course site, blog or departmental or project websites. Even though academics might be sharing these materials, it might not necessarily be easily findable or searchable.

Imagine the yellow flow lines and arrows represent the internet and all its processes and motions. When sharing files without attaching the necessary descriptive elements, the resources are ‘hidden’ and not easily picked up by the various internet processes. Essentially you can think of your resources as being in a box – hidden from view and not easy to find. This is an ineffective kind of sharing.

The kind of sharing you want to aim towards is the kind that makes your resources easily findable and searchable – for your resources to be picked up quite easily by various search engines.

The way to address the problems of the closed box in slide 4 and to achieve slide 5 – UCT offers the UCT OpenContent site as a platform to showcase open teaching and learning materials. When resource links are added to the site, various kinds of descriptive elements are attached to the resource – elements which make the resources easy to find. The site also allows you to make various choices as to the legal conditions attached to the usage of your resources

These legal choices are in the form of the Creative Commons license suite. The Creative Commons licensing system allows for a more flexible management of the exclusive rights offered by copyright law, giving the creators the ability to choose the kinds of protections and freedoms that will govern the use of their work. It is often a misconception that Creative Commons is the opposite to copyright. Creative Commons can be thought of as a management solution for your copyright rights – every right you have as a result of being a copyright holder, you will have if you license work in terms of a Creative Commons license. The true opposite to copyright is public domain. Materials that are in the public domain are not covered by any intellectual property rights and offers the creator of the materials no protection. For an intro to Creative Commons, see the following: http://education-copyright.org/creative-commons/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

There are 2 layers of legal protection surrounding academics – the first overarching layer is the SA copyright law. Copyright applies automatically to original works that has been reduced to a tangible format – this means that by default everything that is on the internet falls under copyright protection unless specified otherwise. The default position therefore means that copying is not allowed unless permission has been granted or the copying falls under one of the exceptions. Copyright is essentially a set of rights granted to an author of an original work, including a bundle of the following exclusive rights: right to reproduce the work right to adapt the work right to distribute or sell the work right to publish the work perform in public or broadcast the work moral rights in the work freedom to transfer rights in work freedom to grant permission to use work in specified manner The second layer is the UCT Intellectual Property Policy which gives specific protection and freedoms to academics. To read the new policy: http://www.uct.ac.za/downloads/uct.ac.za/about/policies/intellect_property.pdf Creative Commons works in conjunction with both by providing a way to manage rights. Other: Copyright management in teaching: http://education-copyright.org/copyright-mngmnt-teaching/

There are quite a few websites you can visit to find open images – see the following post which lists a few sites: http://education-copyright.org/finding-alternative-images-for-use-in-schools/

An academic can therefore have various IP relationships involving both Creative Commons licenses and copyright law.

Creative Commons licensed ported to South Africa

Please feel free to contact me with any questions related to the presentation.  This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial2.5 South Africa License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/za/