I am also very interested in Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Copyright. Plagiarism is a dishonest and unethical practice, that goes against the true academic spirit.
When designing a website, we need to ensure that we own all the materials which constitute part of the website, or have the right to use them, and that all authors and borrowed sources appear credited, e.g. pictures, music, podcasts. Being the designer of TANGO I hold copyright of the resources.
Since Copyright is a property right it can be transferred and sold. As stated in the gov.uk website:
Copyright protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission.
You get copyright protection automatically - you don’t have to apply or pay a fee. There isn’t a register of copyright works in the UK.
You automatically get copyright protection when you create:
You can mark your work with the copyright symbol (©), your name and the year of creation. Whether you mark the work or not doesn’t affect the level of protection you have.
As the designer of TANGO I hold copyright of the website and the learning resources by default. Copyright inhibits others’ use of the resources by putting unnecessary restrictions, in the UK it would be allowed to copy my TANGO materials under the UK Copyright Exceptions for Education. However, by choosing a Creative Commons licence I can make it clear to educators how I wish the content of the website to be used, and whether I allow for it to be repurposed or not.
I believe that it is good practice to use Creative Commons licences, to share the CC principles with others and ensure that our work is used appropriately.
I discovered the Creative Commons licences a few years ago, when I came acrossed one for the first time. I thought that it would be a good idea to use one with TANGO, but wasn’t familiar with them, nor with the legal jargon, and decided to investigate this further contacting a colleague from the VLE team who provided me with further information and helped me chose the most suitable licence. Before that I used the copyright symbol, my name and the date as indicated in the copyright information quoted above.
In the last few years I have used CC licences in most of my websites and hope that whoever may access them and reuse them, will act in accordance to my wishes, as specified in the CC licence chosen:
The copyright law that affects printed materials does not allow for the whole piece of work to be shared, only 5%, however, online OA resources can be shared in their entirety, thus keeping their full properties, intended meaning, purpose, and impact. Although a chapter of a book may have meaning by itself, it would have typically been conceived in conjunction with the other chapters, and its full impact will only be achieved that way, in context. Equally, TANGO’s full educational potential can only be experienced as a whole, when used in accordance with its guidelines, which it is possible to do, although each section, can also be exploited individually, by topic.
I agree what Heather Morrison notes in The Impact Blog of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/03/07/creative-commons-and-open-access-to-scholarly-works/, accessed 29.9.2016):
Many open access advocates consider CC-BY to be consistent with the strongest form of open access, libre open access, as it includes the least restrictions. I argue that the lack of restrictions leaves open access vulnerable, for example vulnerable to re-enclosure for toll access dissemination downstream. For this reason, I consider CC-BY-NC-SA to be the closest choice of the CC license options for strong or libre open access, allowing a broad range of re-uses while imposing restrictions that protect the open access status of the work for the long term.
Learning Technology unlike other disciplines, is a rather new field which, as technology itself, seems to keep on developing faster and faster, and Copyright law will have to keep on evolving to be able to address any aspects that may arise as a consequence.
When designing a website, we need to ensure that we own all the materials which constitute part of the website, or have the right to use them, and that all authors and borrowed sources appear credited, e.g. pictures, music, podcasts. Being the designer of TANGO I hold copyright of the resources.
Since Copyright is a property right it can be transferred and sold. As stated in the gov.uk website:
Copyright protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission.
You get copyright protection automatically - you don’t have to apply or pay a fee. There isn’t a register of copyright works in the UK.
You automatically get copyright protection when you create:
- original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work, including illustration and photography
- original non-literary written work, eg software, web content and databases
- sound and music recordings
- film and television recordings
- broadcasts
- the layout of published editions of written, dramatic and musical works
You can mark your work with the copyright symbol (©), your name and the year of creation. Whether you mark the work or not doesn’t affect the level of protection you have.
As the designer of TANGO I hold copyright of the website and the learning resources by default. Copyright inhibits others’ use of the resources by putting unnecessary restrictions, in the UK it would be allowed to copy my TANGO materials under the UK Copyright Exceptions for Education. However, by choosing a Creative Commons licence I can make it clear to educators how I wish the content of the website to be used, and whether I allow for it to be repurposed or not.
I believe that it is good practice to use Creative Commons licences, to share the CC principles with others and ensure that our work is used appropriately.
I discovered the Creative Commons licences a few years ago, when I came acrossed one for the first time. I thought that it would be a good idea to use one with TANGO, but wasn’t familiar with them, nor with the legal jargon, and decided to investigate this further contacting a colleague from the VLE team who provided me with further information and helped me chose the most suitable licence. Before that I used the copyright symbol, my name and the date as indicated in the copyright information quoted above.
In the last few years I have used CC licences in most of my websites and hope that whoever may access them and reuse them, will act in accordance to my wishes, as specified in the CC licence chosen:
- https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/tango
- https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/tango-feedback/
- https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/media-communication-essay/
- https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/spanish-a1/ - here I have have added a filter to my voice so that it appears as if there are two different spekers. That’s the reason there is nobody else credited in the website
- https://sites.google.com/site/1925manuelalvarezgonzalez/ - here I chose a CC-BY-NC- ND licence to protect the original content of the website, written by my Father
- http://carmenalvarezmayo.weebly.com/
The copyright law that affects printed materials does not allow for the whole piece of work to be shared, only 5%, however, online OA resources can be shared in their entirety, thus keeping their full properties, intended meaning, purpose, and impact. Although a chapter of a book may have meaning by itself, it would have typically been conceived in conjunction with the other chapters, and its full impact will only be achieved that way, in context. Equally, TANGO’s full educational potential can only be experienced as a whole, when used in accordance with its guidelines, which it is possible to do, although each section, can also be exploited individually, by topic.
I agree what Heather Morrison notes in The Impact Blog of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/03/07/creative-commons-and-open-access-to-scholarly-works/, accessed 29.9.2016):
Many open access advocates consider CC-BY to be consistent with the strongest form of open access, libre open access, as it includes the least restrictions. I argue that the lack of restrictions leaves open access vulnerable, for example vulnerable to re-enclosure for toll access dissemination downstream. For this reason, I consider CC-BY-NC-SA to be the closest choice of the CC license options for strong or libre open access, allowing a broad range of re-uses while imposing restrictions that protect the open access status of the work for the long term.
Learning Technology unlike other disciplines, is a rather new field which, as technology itself, seems to keep on developing faster and faster, and Copyright law will have to keep on evolving to be able to address any aspects that may arise as a consequence.