International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 97

Know Your Audience(s): Collaborating for Copyright Education
open and accessible so that people
who want to remix or adapt content
have the freedom and flexibility to
do so.
Modeling Use of Copyright-
Protected Content
An OER on the topic of copyright not
only serves as a resource for content
creators and users, it also serves as a
model for how copyright-protected
materials can most flexibly be used and
attributed as part of an OER. Since one
of the project’s goals is to maximize the
ability for others to re-use or adapt the
material, the team agreed on a scheme
of using openly licensed content that
would not hinder content re-use.
As part of the effort to effect maximum
re-usability, the project team created
guidelines for the selection and citation
of openly-licensed works used in
the modules. This follows the findings
of Santos-Hermosa (2014), who noted
that educators found OER more usable
when no copyright clearances were
required. To maximize the ability for
downstream users to re-use and remix
the material without having to acquire
additional permissions from copyright
holders, the team expressed a strong
preference for images, videos, and other
materials that were already in the public
domain or were licensed under Creative
Commons Attribution (CC-BY) terms.
Citations for all sources were provided
on slides at the end of each module, and
in cases where slightly more restrictive
forms of Creative Commons licences
were used, the licence type was noted in
context. For example, an image licensed
under an Attribution-NonCommercial
(CC-BY-NC) licence would have its
matching Creative Commons licence
logo placed directly adjacent. Even for
public domain material, attribution and
source information was provided to facilitate
future use of the same resources
by other people.
A secondary objective of the
project has been to combat copyright
chill in Canada by advocating for users’
rights under exceptions such as fair
dealing (similar to “fair use” in some
other jurisdictions); however, the project
did not want to rely heavily on fair
dealing exceptions in its own use of
copyright-protected material. Though
the modules themselves advocate for
the value of users’ rights in the Canadian
Copyright Act, the project does
not seek to force downstream users of
the material to shoulder the risks or
responsibilities associated with such
choices. The decision to avoid reliance
on fair dealing (or similar) exceptions
has a significant consequence: it reduces
the amount of copyright-protected
material that can be reasonably incorporated
into the modules for the sake
of increasing engagement. As a result,
the decision to forgo fair dealing is one
point where concerns over re-usability
have trumped engagement concerns in
the OER triangle.
Additionally, the team’s desire
to maximize the quality and engagement
potential of the modules has led
to painstaking selection of visuallyand
thematically-coherent imagery,
diagrams, and icons for video presentations.
This preference was not solely
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