Why are license contracts useful?

Copyright law protects the author in his relationship to the work. Both ideal interests, such as the recognition of authorship, and economic interests, the author’s exploitation and editing rights, are taken into account. A work is automatically protected, i.e. it does not have to be registered like a patent. In order to transfer your own economic rights, for example to allow adaptations or redistribution, a license agreement makes sense.

Which free licenses are available?

Since open content can fall into very different categories, there are also different types of open content licenses. These include, for example, the GNU General Public Licenses for software, but also the Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses), which are mainly used for (spoken) texts, (moving) images and the like and therefore play a major role in the field of OER.

For information on license types other than CC licenses, you can consult the website of the Institute for Legal Issues of Free and Open Source Software.

What are CC licenses?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has set itself the goal of making it easy to overcome the legal obstacles that arise when concluding a license agreement. This is why they provide the CC licenses of the same name, with which it is possible to grant simple rights of use to one's own material to all people worldwide in a simple, fast and standardized way and still ensure that one’s own interests in one's own work are protected.

The CC licenses consist of four modules, which result in six licenses. (For a more detailed description of the licenses and further information, please refer to the UB subpage on CC licenses). However, not all licenses should be regarded as free culture licenses; there are various gradations. The licenses classified as free include the CC BY and CC BY-SA licenses, which are therefore also recommended in the UDE OER policy.

Help with licensing

If you need help choosing the right license for your work and have already acquired basic knowledge of the license elements and their terminology, the Creative Commons License Chooser can help you put together the right license, including the appropriate license notice. On the Creative Commons website you will also find logos, badges, and icons to download to visually support your license.

If you want to use images from Wikimedia Commons, the license notice generator will help you to formulate the right license.

You can find sample formulations and further information on licensing in the “Wording sample CC license information”.

The “Legal guide to OER production” guides you through your OER project with various questions and provides information on what you should consider legally during the production or final check of your OER.

Of course, we are also available to answer your questions at any time. Get in touch with us!