Annotated Creative Commons resources

These annotated Creative Commons resources are intended to supplement the resources found in the Creative Commons for Educators, Academic Librarians, and GLAM online certificate course and corresponding, publically accessible website. Resources are organized by course unit.

Unit 1: What is Creative Commons?

• Napster Documentary: Culture of Free, The New York Times, NYT YouTube Channel, All Rights Reserved. This is a fascinating, short documentary that goes beyond the rise and fall of Napster to touch on the cultural shift in expectations related to what can and should be "openly" available online and the relatively rapid monetization of this new societal expectation, by Apple initially and now by many other companies. For many, downloading "free" songs from Napster was their introduction to the concept of "open access" and, in many ways, our collective attempt to prevent that from happening while still giving creators the power to control their intellectual property impacted efforts like CC. The events described in this documentary could very much be viewed as providing the context for Unit 1.1: The Story of Creative Commons. This video was not annotated in H5P as it was unclear whether such annotation constituted an adaptation of an All Rights Reserved work and therefore a copyright infringement.

Unit 2: Copyright Law

• CopyrightX: Lecture 1.2: The Foundations of Copyright Law: Originality, William Fisher, The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society YouTube Channel, CC BY 4.0. In this video, Dr. Fisher unpacks the concept of originality as it pertains to copyrightable work. He reviews the criteria for determining originality and discusses the role of some frequently misunderstood concepts (e.g., novelty). Recorded in 2013, this is one of a collection of videos from Harvard's CopyrightX online course. H5P was used to annotate this video using bookmarks and reflection questions.
• Circular 33: Works Not Protected by Copyright, U.S. Copyright Office, 2021, All Rights Reserved. Public annotations have been added to the document using the Hypothesis browser extension. This document provides a nice list of work that does not receive copyright protection, including recipes, domain names, and forms. This might provide some context in Unit 2: Copyright Basics. A better understanding of what can't be CC-licensed might help people differentiate original authorship from lists.

Unit 3: Anatomy of a CC License

• Noncommercial Isn’t the Problem, ShareAlike Is, David Wiley, CC BY 4.0 International. Public annotations have been added to the document using the Hypothesis browser extension. Although this blog post is dated and the copyleft/ShareAlike (SA) problem he mentions related to mixing GFDL and CC-licensed content was addressed in 2008 when Wikipedia adopted a dual-licensing model, Wiley's fundamental question is still compelling: why would faculty apply an SA restriction when they are interested in allowing their colleagues the most freedom to remix their work? Why not go all the way and put your work in the public domain? The fact that this hasn't happened yet and there does not appear to be a groundswell of support for it among faculty currently must mean that there are some pretty powerful forces restraining them from removing all copyright restrictions, and the SA restriction in particular. Psychologically, most instructors who apply the SA restriction probably do so to ensure that adapters do not lock their creation behind a more restrictive license. They want their work, in all of its forms, to benefit the public good in perpetuity. While this reading also pertains to Unit 4 and using CC licences, considering Wiley's argument might help personalize the SA restriction information presented in Unit 3.3: License Types.

Unit 4: Using CC Licenses and CC Licensed Works

• Circular 14: Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations, U.S. Copyright Office, 2020, All Rights Reserved. Public annotations have been added to the document using the Hypothesis browser extension. One of the U.S. Copyright Office's circulars, this document provides clear definitions and some helpful examples of both derivative works or adaptations and compiled works or collections, topics covered in Unit 4.4: Remixing CC-Licensed Work. The concept of "new original copyrightable authorship" is introduced to distinguish the adaptation or collection from preexisting work and the examples provide useful context for making that determination. Although not relevant to the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM course, this circular also reviews the steps copyright owners can take to register their adaptations and collections as All Rights Reserved if desired. As of March 1st, 1989, such registration is optional.

Unit 5: CC for Educators

• MIT OpenCourseWare Press Conference 2001, From the Vault of MIT, All Rights Reserved. This is a recording of the MIT press conference on April 4th, 2001 during which President Charles Vest announced the launch of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative wherein all materials from all MIT courses would be shared online openly. This decision sent shockwaves through higher education and triggered multiple seismic shifts in its wake, including the initiation of the massive open online course (MOOC) movement, the development of instructional technologies to support online access to learning via multiple channels and mediums, and the general recognition that information technology could increase access and democratize learning, that learning could be supported online effectively, and that education was more than just the materials used in a course. It could be argued that this initiative dovetailed with the emergence of Creative Commons licensing to cause a permanent culture shift in higher education. Although there is still an enormous amount of fear, anxiety, and bureaucratic entropy that must be overcome, this decision by MIT will likely be considered a pivotal moment in human history that propelled open education forward. For more information, watch the recording of the 2011 MIT panel discussion on a decade of OCW. This video was not annotated in H5P as it was unclear whether such annotation constituted an adaptation of an All Rights Reserved work and therefore a copyright infringement.

 

Except where otherwise noted, text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.