Authorship rights: Copyrighted materials and Public Domain materials
Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time.
However, you may prefer just to “leave it there”: to create something nice – a good object – and give it to people. But this normal human altruistic attitude towards sharing becomes problematic if viewed from the logic of copyright. In the world of copyright there is a threat of theft. It claims that if your object is “out there” and nobody “owns” it properly, then anyone can take that object and claim it as their own (for instance filing a patent on your object), and thus restrict the public and your access to that object, thus effectively “stealing” it from you and from the public.
The copyright principle is one of a type of protection of the creator’s rights, which enforces the creator’s exclusive ownership rights on that object. But what if you do not want that right? What if you want something different? What if you want to share the product of your creativity freely? This right can be violated, and this right needs to be protected. This type of reasoning has led to the idea of Creative Commons. It was the copyleft movement that contributed this pragmatic and practical solution to the “copyright debate”.
Canada enacted Fair Use provisions into copyright law. See the Chronology of Canadian Copyright, which allows the limited use of copyrighted materials for teaching—including digitized copies of many works.
“…fair dealing is a “user’s right”, and the relevant perspective when considering whether the dealing is for an allowable purpose… is that of the user…” (See p. [22] : Province of Alberta as represented by the Minister of Education v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency Operating as “Access Copyright”)
The Council of Ministers of Education in Canada has resource on copyright (CMEC, 2012).
Dr Rory McGreal – UNESCO / Commonwealth of Learning Chair in Open Educational Resources shares his expertise in a series of 10 short, informative videos explains how the Fair Dealing concept is reflected in Canadian legislation.
Contact North Vid 9 from Signature Group on Vimeo.
The USA copyright law is different, (see the timeline: history of copyright the United States, made by the Association of Research Libraries). Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University: http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright-quick-guide
Resource for the European Union: Europa portal summary of intellectual property law in the common market .
Works in the Public Domain are those whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, are inapplicable, or never existed. Every year the number of public domain materials is growing: see Public domain resource, UBC
Open access stands for free and public access to quality assured scientific information on the Internet, without financial, legal or technical barriers. At the same time open access ensures the authors control over their publications and the right to recognition of authorship and citation.
Open access comes in two degrees: gratis open access, which is free online access, and libre open access, which is free online access plus some additional usage rights. These additional usage rights are often granted through the use of various specific Creative Commons licenses. Only libre open access is fully compliant with definitions of open access such as the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities – one of the milestones of the Open Access movement.
Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That is Creative Commons: Explore the Creative Commons Licenses. Downloads (to be used in printed publications).
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course conspectus by TB is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.