8. Knowing what you are allowed to do with online resources
Figure 1: Colombian marine biology student sued for copyright infringement
Although learning resources are freely accessible online, it may not be allowed to download many of the Internet resources and store them on your computer or share them with others. This is especially the case for resources that are copyrighted under All rights reserved. If you want to use these resources, you need get permission from the owner before you use them. Content for which copyright information is not clear may be treated as content released under All rights reserved. You may read the content online, but you should not downloaded it, adapted it or changed it unless you have received the copyright holder's written permission. Otherwise, you or/and your institution may find yourself in legal hassle as Diego Gomez, a Colombian students who shared a marine biology dissertation and was sued for millions of dollars (see the picture above). Luckily, he was acquitted after several years in legal battle.
However, some Internet content has been released under Creative Commons licences. Creative Commons licences are created based on four properties: 1) Attribution which means that the user give credit to the creator/author, 2) Share Alike which means that the user has also to share the derivative work under the same licence, 3) Noderivative which means that the content should not be changes and 4) Noncommercial which means that the content should not be used for commercial purposes. By combining these four properties, six Creative Commons licences were developed. The following tables indicate different Creative Commons licences from the one in which most permissions were granted to the one in which least permissions were granted.
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Simplified licence |
Permissions granted |
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Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) |
Re-distribute, remix, revise, and create derivative work, even for commercial purposes, as long as credit is appropriately given to the original creator. |
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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA) |
Remix, revise, redistribute and create derivative work even for commercial purposes, as long as credit is attributed to the original author and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. |
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Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivative (CC BY-ND) |
Re-distribute the content for commercial and non-commercial purposes, as long as the resources are disseminated unchanged and in whole, with credit to the original creator. |
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommecial (CC BY-NC) |
Remix, revise, and redistribute the content for non-commercial purposes as long as credit is attributed to the creator. Derivative work can be created as long as the original creator is acknowledged and the new creation is used non-commercially, but the derivative work does not have to be licensed under the same terms. |
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) |
Remix, revise, and create derivative work for non-commercial purposes, as long as credit is appropriately attributed to the original creator and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. |
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Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial NoDerivative (CC BY-NC-ND) |
Reuse and redistribution of the content as long as the credit is attributed to the author, no change is made on the content, and the use is only non-commercial. |
For more information about Creative Commons licences, please visit the Creative Commons website.