Considerations Before Embedding CC Licences

Before you apply a CC licence to your resource, it is important that you consider any potential legal and/or licensing issues. For instance:

  • You can only apply a CC licence to your resource (or to its component parts) if you are the creator of all of the materials included in the resource or if you have the express permission of the creator or copyright owner of materials included in your resource.
  • To license their materials under the CC licence you have selected (In the case of orphan works, you will need to take a risk-managed approach before you decide to make them available under a CC licence).
  • It is possible to apply different CC licences to different resources according to the rights and/or permissions that you may have. However, if you choose to do this, you will need to consider the ramifications for your users.

You will need to decide whether you choose a ported licence (jurisdiction-specific) or an unported licence (jurisdiction-unspecified). The ported licences, such as used by the Open University Open Learn Project, have been drafted for compatibility with UK-laws and provide a specified jurisdiction in the cases of disputes. Ported CC licences, such as the CC licences version 3.0 are beneficial for content creators when working collaboratively with non UK partners or in cases where the required jurisdiction-based licence is not available. They are also useful for providing users with the optimum ability to mash data sourced from a variety of places.

(adapted from Korn 2011)