Readings and Reuse Permissions

Open Licenses: The Nitty Gritty

Public Domain

Texts, images, or media artifacts in the public domain are free for anyone to use in whatever way they see fit. They can be rehosted, altered, revised, and remixed, and users need not even provide media attributions to use them.

Applications:

• Revisions, Reimaginings, Remixes, and Mash-Ups: A group of students could create creative reworkings of materials in the public domain, for instance, by using public domain images in a published website or rewriting an old poem using some of its original lines. (Educational fair use standards often cover these kinds of activities anyway, but fair use determinations can sometimes be complicated, whereas public domain use determinations are very simple.)

CC-BY

A Creative Commons Attribution License is the most generous license out there. As long as you mention who originally created this material and mention if you’ve made any changes, you can:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Reading Applications:

• Instructional Resource Mash-Ups: Say you loved both Jenn Kepka’s “Transitions and Organization” and Babin et al.’s  “Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development” but felt that you’d prefer to combine disparate sections of each text into one new, streamlined article of your own rather than include both essays. You could do this so long as you gave credit to the creators, provided links to the original sources, and mentioned that the new text was an amended synthesis of the two works.
• Student Remixes: Say you wanted students to creatively rewrite Mary Louise Pratt’s “Lessons for Losing” in a way that appealed to a different audience group and then re-publish it in public anthology. Students could do so as long as they attributed their original source.

CC-BY-NC

A Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license is just like CC-BY above, but with the caveat that others are not entitled to use this material in resources that are created primarily for monetary gain.

As the Creative Commons organization frames this monetary gain caveat:

Creative Commons NC licenses expressly define NonCommercial as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” ^[2]The inclusion of “primarily” in the definition recognizes that no activity is completely disconnected from commercial activity; it is only the primary purpose of the reuse that needs to be considered.

The definition of NonCommercial is intentionally flexible; the definition is specific enough to make its intended operation and reach clear, but versatile enough to cover a wide variety of use cases.

[…] NC licensing does not stop commercial uses covered by limitations and exceptions (such as fair uses).

Often, an NC license permits users to print CC-BY-NC materials at cost and/or with the inclusion of a small sustainability fee.

CC-BY-NC* Writing Spaces

Writing Spaces essays, published in part through the WAC Clearing House, bear an additional caveat that imposes the narrowest interpretation of the NC clause I’ve yet seen, indicating that:

1. Materials may be used by individuals, institutions, governments, corporations, or other businesses whether for-profit or non-profit so long as the use itself is not a commercialization of the materials or a use that is directly intended to generate sales or profit.
2. Incidental charges to recover reasonable reproduction costs may be permitted. This would not include the sale of a course packet from a copy shop to students where the copy shop profits off the sale of the materials, whether a university copy shop or a commercial one.

What this copy-shop clause means is that you could reprint these Writing Spaces essays through a not-for-profit copyshop, but you could not use a corporate service like IngramSpark.

Writing Spaces essays also stipulate that people are welcome to contact the essays’ original authors to ask for their permission to reproduce essays in other ways.

CC-BY-NC-ND

“No Derivatives” simply means that you can’t publicly publish a significantly modified version of the resource in question. (This is the same non-modification standard that applies to any traditional reproduction of a copyrighted work.)

CC-BY-NC-SA

“Share Alike” simply means that if you remix, transform, or build upon the material in question, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the source essay. You can do this on an essay-by-essay (aka chapter-by-chapter) basis in Pressbooks.

Licenses in this Mock-Up Text