Have the licensing talk early to

maximize impact: Experiences

from three collaborative projects

Dominik Lukes@TechCzech - Researchity.net

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@TechCzech

Presentation on j.mp/licensing-talk

Three projects:

iLearnRW, Load2Learn, LDD Navigator

Alt title:

How I found out

I’m a licensing geek!

Typed up in a few hours

Why?

People have inflated

expectations of the value of

their IP

People are ignorant of

copyright law implications

Content everyone wants

shared cannot be reused

due to unclear copyright

ownership

Solution?

Have the licensing talk early!

Licensing talking

points

Value of IP

How are we leveraging the

value of our IP?

Who sees our IP and would

we benefit more if it was out

in the open being used by

people?

Do we have any IP locked

away in documents that

have not been used by

anyone but may have impact

if shared openly?

Lack of clarity in a

collaborative project

Who owns the copyright?

Are all people working on a

collaborative project under

the same contract with their

institution?

How about copyright

ownership under different

jurisdictions? May not

always be enforceable by

contract?

What are specific conditions

of use once all principals

involved in creation and

collaboration leave?

Reality of Open

Licensing

You still OWN copyright of

openly licensed materials!

Open licences can offer

more realistic protection of

your IP by securing

attribution.

Many materials in education

with permission to copy

already effectively BY NC

SA.

Open licences give explicit

permission and remove

incorrect assumptions about

ownership.

Open Licensing

avoids awkward

conversations…

“I thought we owned that.”

“We can only use this internally because we’re not sure if we own it.”

“We need to get a permission from X who left 2 year ago before we can use this.”

Open Licensing

business models

You can still sell openly

licensed materials

(printed versions, special

formats, content

subscriptions, …).

Openly Licensed materials

can be doing the work of

advertising other services.

Openly Licensed materials

can directly support a

charitable mission.

Other sources of funding /

crowdsourcing can be

available for the

development and

maintenance of openly

licensed content.

Recommendations

Content

CC BY or CC BY SA

Code

Modified BSD or (a)GPL

Results

All three projects where this

was proposed accepted the

idea in principle.

1. Accepted with more

restrictive license (added

NC).

2. Accepted with more

liberal license (BY instead of

BY SA)

3. Accepted as proposed

(BY SA)

It takes more work to get

from agreement to actual

implementation, but…

Load2Learn.org.uk/training/cuecards

OER Videos on

YouTube.com/Load2Learn

iLearnRW will release code and content

bit.ly/cc-teachers

Image credits

Rainbow Bee-eater, food transfer by David and

Dorothy Jenkins CC BY NC SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/78742710@N08/16174327408

Thank you

@TechCzech