Copyright in a Digital World

A discussion of Creative CommonsBy Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen

What copyright was

Article 1, Section 8 of the US constitution says,

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

This is the basis of modern copyright, patent, and intellectual property principals and law.

Copyright gives the holder the right to:

• To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;• To prepare derivative works based upon the work;• To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale

or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;• To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic,

and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

• To display the 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

• In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

How does this relate to works in a digital and collaborative world?

What is a Creative Commons?

“Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.”

Different CC Licenses Available

• Attribution: Lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

• Attribution Share Alike: Lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

• Attribution No Derivatives: Allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

• Non commercial versions of all above

Getting a Creative Commons License

• Fill out this worksheet to determine type and receive html code to publish with the work http://creativecommons.org/choose/

• Some collaborative sites offer creative commons options to their users, such as http://www.flickr.com/

Places to find CC copyrighted works

• Open Clip art Library: http://openclipart.org/• Flickr: http://www.flickr.com• Google books: http://books.google.com/• Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org/• MIT Open Courseware: http://

ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

• Whitehouse.gov: http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Search for others

• Creative commons search: http://search.creativecommons.org/

• CC Case studies: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies

• Google and Google images http://www.google.com and http://images.google.com

The Science Commons

http://sciencecommons.org “Science Commons has three interlocking

initiatives designed to accelerate the research cycle — the continuous production and reuse of knowledge that is at the heart of the scientific method. Together, they form the building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design.”

Bibliography

• Creative Commons. (2002). . Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http://creativecommons.org/.

• Peter Kershaw. (2003). Copyrights and their origin. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http://hushmoney.org/copyright.htm.

• Science Commons. (2005). Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http://sciencecommons.org/.

• US Copyright Office. (2008). Copyright Basics (p. 12). Government, . Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf.

This work is provided as a licensed work.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To

view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or

send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is available on the OIT libraries website http://www.oit.edu/libraries and through the OIT Libraries

slide share account http://www.slideshare.net/oitreference

Please refer questions to Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen dawn.lowe-wincentsen@oit.edu or 503.821.1258