Licensed Materials

Licensed Materials

What About Licensed Material?

You've learned that the creators of content are automatically granted copyright protection when the work is fixed in a tangible form of expression. These creators can grant usage of their material through licensing, which establishes legal parameters for the use of their work.

Licenses are legal agreements that stipulate how you can use the material. A license is granted to a licensee by a licensor. It is essential for a licensee to abide by the terms of licensing in order to avoid copyright infringement. 

Some examples of licensed material that you might encounter include Creative Commons, stock images on a website, and publisher material. Each of these examples has its own rules for how you can use the content. It’s important to remember that the content is still protected by copyright, but the license grants you specific use.

Publisher Material

The text and coursepack materials that students are required to purchase grant certain usage to academic institutions for the duration that the text is used for instruction. Licenses will typically allow the licensee to use and/or modify the publisher content during the license period. This means that it may be lawful via the license to modify publisher PowerPoints, copy text content and assignments into the course, reuse images, etc. When the term of license expires (i.e., the text/version is no longer used in the course), all of the licensed content must be removed. It is important to verify the terms of the license and document all uses of licensed content to easily locate and remove after the license expires. Publisher material cannot be incorporated into Orbis learning objects or any other proprietary content. It's also important to remember that Orbis does not offer ADA remediation to publisher materials.
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Copyright and the rights granted by the license are just one consideration when deciding what publisher content to include in the course. While it may be lawful, it may not be best design practice. It's crucial to have a discussion with the SME that distinguishes these two aspects of course design: copyright and best design practice. Best design practices include the quality, integrity, and maintenance of the course content. Publisher content should be used, according to Orbis' best practices, judiciously and sparingly with respect to our role in advocating for program integrity. Students are investing in an authentic, valuable education and this merits the creation of unique content as much as possible. It may be tempting to copy over en masse the publisher PowerPoints, assignments, case studies, and discussion prompts if the license allows it, but this can undermine the quality and integrity of the program and create maintenance issues once the license expires.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that allows individuals to share material. Creators of content can grant copyright permissions through a CC license in an easy way and contribute to the body of creative and academic work. The author can choose which CC license they would like to protect their work. Each of the CC licenses has specific parameters for how you can utilize their content.

Creative Commons Infographic

Download this infographic for a quick reference on how you can utilize materials licensed in Creative Commons:
  1. Creative Commons Licenses Infographic

Other Licenses

There are many websites that, like Creative Commons, provide a repository of content for the purpose of sharing. These websites allow users to easily distribute their copyrighted material under a license that can stipulate how their content is used. You will need to investigate each website's terms of use to learn their licensing parameters. One example is Unsplash, a source of stock photographs. Their license can be found on the dropdown menu in the upper righthand corner; click on Legal - License. 

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