Teaching Online at UTAS

Obtaining and using images and videos to enliven your unit content can be frustrating and a copyright minefield!

However, searching for images and videos with Creative Commons licences can make the hunt for useable content easier. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are designed to make the rules around re-use of content very clear to everyday people – not just to lawyers.

Here’s an introduction to the concept of Creative Commons.

Understanding CC Licences and attribution of content

What kind of licence should you look for if you want to use images, video or even sounds in your unit? Generally, any Creative Commons licence allows us to share content for non-commercial purposes, like education, through vehicles like our MyLO sites. However, some CC licences require you to attribute the content to the original creator, share alike any content that you have created using the original content, or show the CC licence under which the item is used. Other licences prohibit any derivatives of the original work (in other words, you can’t change the original content in any way).

• For a brief summary of the different CC licences, click here.
• Click here for more information about attributing Creative Commons licensed content.

Finding CC licenced content

There are so many images and videos out there on the web: how do you find the ones that carry Creative Commons licences?

• You can use Creative Commons’ simple search function to search for CC licensed content.
• This brief article, from Fractus Learning, details five tools that students can use to find images with Creative Commons licenses. We think teaching staff might find them useful too!

Do I have to provide attributions for…?

Videos (or other multimedia) that I find online?
When someone uploads a video to YouTube or similar video sites, they can switch off the ability to ’embed’ the video in other websites. If embedding is enabled, the creator is usually happy for their video to be shared on other sites, or at least linked to. However – use caution! Don’t embed or link to videos that have obviously been uploaded  without the original author’s permission. For example, when I look up a music video called The Salmon Dance (a song by the Chemical Brothers) on YouTube, I find several versions of the video. One has been uploaded by emimusic, another has been uploaded by ChemicalBrothersTV, and other versions have been uploaded by users with names like  ReyMysterio1254 and cheree4life. I should use the version from emimusic (the band’s label) or ChemicalBrothersTV (the band’s official YouTube channel), as these are most likely channels run by the owners of the music video content.

Common sources of videos and multimedia include:

• Youtube. Millions of videos of varying quality are available here. Some channels are more reputable than others. A particularly good channel is TED, which features short talks on a wide variety of big ideas and issues from across the world. Be mindful that students cannot download these videos, so can only watch them whilst online. Also, many Youtube videos will commence with a short advertisement, which you will not be able to switch off. Students in China can not access YouTube videos due to enforced internet restrictions.
• Vimeo. Similar to YouTube, you can search for and embed/link to videos. Here is an example of a tutorial video on Vimeo. The same warnings apply as per YouTube, however, there are no ads. Yay!
• Merlot. This database contains annotated links to open educational resources, and organises them into categories. Alternatively, you can search for key words.  Resources may include videos or interactives.
• Publishers may be willing to share videos, either online or as part of an embeddable object. Check that these do not require students to use a username and password, as some may be behind paywalls.

Music and sounds
In most cases, you will need to obtain permission from the creator/copyright owner to use music or sounds. It is OK to link to songs that the creator has made available online themselves (you’ll find plenty of these on SoundCloud), but incorporating sounds into a video or multimedia object is different. There are some open source sound and musics sites where you can seek out audio for inclusion in PowerPoints and Videos, but check the Copyright conditions first. At a minimum you will be required to acknowledge the creator. Useful sites include Freesound (for sound bites), Free Music Archive (for music), and DigccMixter (for music).

Hyperlinks to webpages?
There is no need to attribute a link to a website, as a visitor is taken straight to the source of the content when they click on the hyperlink.

Images embedded in your site (originating from another site)?
When I embed an image in a page, it is ‘linked’ from a page on the web and appears as an image on my own site. For example, here is an image of Dr Stuart Crispin (from the TSBE website) that I have ’embedded’ in this page.
Technically, the creator has made the image publicly available on their own website (in this case, the image belongs to the university, so I can use it!). However, without an attribution, the image could be easily misconstrued as my own creation. Even with an attribution, I may not have permission to ‘bring in’ the image, even though it is coming from another website. So, when in doubt, check with the owner of the image first, and provide an attribution with the image once you have obtained permission. Searching for a Creative Commons licensed image will take some of the guess-work out of how to use an image.If you’re looking for a clip-art type image, check out OpenClipArt.

When in doubt…

Visit the UTAS Copyright website

http://www.utas.edu.au/copyright

or contact the Copyright Officer by email to utas.copyright@utas.edu.au