Learn concepts of copyright, public domain, fair use, and open licensing. Find open educational resources (OER) online; Recognize how to cite and share OER. In the U.S., copyright was written into the original constitution in 1787. Intangibles, such as ideas, concepts, and mathematical equations and works that lack originality cannot be copyrighted.

By default, the author of a work holds the copyright on that work. The main exception to this rule would be if the author was being paid by someone else to create the work and the author had signed a contract. Some educator contracts state that creative works by an educator are owned by the educator, while others state that they areowned by the school or district. You can generally provide a web link to copyrighted material from your own materials without permission from the copyright holder. You must still abide by any copyright restrictions placed on the work, which might determine how and where you use the work.

U.S. copyright law states that copyright ends 70 years after the death of the author. Upon expiration, copyrighted materials move into the public domain. Can I embed copyrighted materials into my presentation or website (e.g., YouTube videos)? That depends on the terms of the license that the copyright holder has released the content under.

Fair use is an exception or limitation to copyright law that allows you to use some copyrighted materials. The four guiding principles that determine if use is fair are: "Fair Use" Guiding Principles: Nature of Use, Type of Work, Amount Used, Commercial Impact. Fair use only applies to uses of works that are transformative in nature.

If it weren't for fair use, you wouldn't even be able to write a paper that quoted a famous author without permission. Fair use becomes problematic in education if you are trying to use educational works in your own creations and/or you are using too much. To determine if a desired use of copyright-restricted material would fall under fair Use, ask yourself four questions: Use: Is the use transformative? (Yes = Fair Use) Type: is the work informational/factual in nature? (yes = Fair use) Amount: IsThe use minimal? ( yes = Fair Uses) Impact: Does the use negatively impact the copyright holder's ability to profit from the work? (No = Fairuse)

Some institutions will allow copyrighted materials to be used up to a certain percent of the work. Parody is one example of fair use in which copyrighted materials may be used to critique the author. In any case, abiding by your institutional rules for fair use helps to ensure that your institution will be on your side if there is any question about your copyright-restricted material use.

Fair use can be very fuzzy, and it may be that educators violate fair use regularly in their classrooms without worrying about legal repercussions. Even if copyright is violated, the risks associated with violation tend to vary by use. In general, there are three groups of works that are in the public domain: Old works for which the copyright has expired; Exempt works that may not be copyrighted or that were created under certain conditions; Any works that have been released to the public Domain by their authors.

Some works may still be in the public domain that were created less than 70 years ago. Works may also be exempt from copyright if they are created under certain conditions of employment. Since they are not subject to copyright protection, public domain works may be used for anything and may even be included in derivative works and may be sold. The terms "open" and "free" colloquially have many meanings. "Free" generally has two that may be best understood by referring to their latin equivalents: gratis and libre.

Openness may mean different things to different people, but when we refer to openness in terms of open licensing, we mean openness that gives us freedom to do the five R's. Open licenses have arisen as a means for openly sharing content while at the same time preserving desired rights to the author. Authors of creative works have the right to release those works under any license they choose (except in cases where they have signed over that right to a publisher, employer, etc.) The table below provides three examples of common open licenses.

The most common Creative Commons license is the CC BY or Creative Commons Attribution license. This means that others are free to reuse, redistribute, revise, and remix the creation as long as they properly cite the author. More information about each license is provided in the following table.

If a work does not have a statement of copyright status attached to it, you should generally assume that it is copyrighted and should seek permission before using it. Open educational resources (OER) are made available from many different sources. Explore these resources to find material that will be useful for you in your classroom, taking note of what licenses resources are released under. Watch this video to learn how to use a search engine to find openly licensed content.

Fish and Wildlife Digital Library - public domain works (mostly) Lumen Learning Wikiversity [http://en.wikiversity.org] These tools are not technically open educational resources, but they can be used to aide you in creating, remixing, and sharing open educationalresources. Google Drive – write and create collaboratively. Rewordify - simplify difficult texts. Text Compactor - summarize and summarize texts. Open Text Summarizer - summarizes nonfiction texts.

As the author of a creative work, you can release your it under an open license or into the public domain. If you want to receive credit (be cited) when others use it, use CC BY 3.0. For a more detailed walkthrough of how you should release your content, follow the steps provided in the table below.

Releasing your work under an open license is easy. Just place a statement somewhere on your work that states what license you are releasing it under. The Creative Commons site provides a wizard to create a statement and image for you. More details about the Creative Commons licenses may be found on the Creative Commons website.