- Know your rights as a copyright holder
US law states that a copyright owner "has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
- to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
- to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
- to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
- in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
- in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly;
- in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission."
2. Defining Openness: The 5 R’s
The term "open" gets used a lot, but it should be reserved for works that allow for the 5 R's:Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
--David Wiley, http://opencontent.org/definition/
3. Understand the different open licenses
There are several different kinds of Creative Commons licenses. Each one grants a different range of permissible uses and places certain conditions on that usage, but all are comprised of a combination of the following four elements:
CC BY Attribution: Users must cite the author(s) of the work when reusing it
CC NC NonCommercial: Users cannot charge a fee for reusing the work
CC SA ShareAlike: New works based on the original must use the same open license
CC ND NoDerivatives: The original work cannot be used to create a derivative work
4. Remix works with the right licences
Not all open licenses allow unrestricted remixing of content, those with an ND license (above) being an important case in point. Use the following matrix from Creative Commons to determine if the two works you want to combine are licensed to allow for it.
5. Remember that format and technology choices affect openness
David Wiley reminds us that a work can be openly licensed yet remain closed to most would-be users if that work is produced in a format or using a technology that restricts remixing to those who can afford to purchase the proprietary tools or platforms needed.
Access to Editing Tools: Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive (e.g., 3DS MAX)? Is the open content published in an exotic format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that run on an obscure or discontinued platform (e.g., OS/2)? Is the open content published in a format that can be revised or remixed using tools that are freely available and run on all major platforms (e.g., OpenOffice)?
Level of Expertise Required: Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Blender)? Is the open content published in a format that requires a minimum level of technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Word)?
Meaningfully Editable: Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document)? Is the open content published in a manner making its content easy to revise or remix (e.g., a text file)?
Self-Sourced: It the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g., HTML)? Is the format preferred for consuming the open content different from the format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g. Flash FLA vs SWF)?
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