Introduction to OER

• A Creative Commons (CC) license is a public copyright license that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. Any person can apply a Creative Commons license to their work, and any person can take advantage of the license to use the licensed work according to the terms and conditions of the relevant license. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work (Wikipedia, 2016). 

  A CC licence is issued by Creative Commons - a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. While there are other licence-granting organizations, Creative Commons is by far the most common way in which Open Educational Resources (OER) are licensed as open. 

  The following video explains CC licences by comparing them to Copyrighted material:

  
  

Creative Commons licences are organized into four different licensing conditions (Attribution, Share Alike, No Derivatives, and Non-Commercial) are combined in different ways to produce six licenses. The document below briefly outlines the different conditions and licenses available: