How do you find reusable content for teaching

by Dominik Lukeš ·

I just gave the following answer to this question from a student. Perhaps somebody can find this useful. Comments welcome:

does anyone know the rules about using images from the internet for teaching resources in terms of copyright? I have been copying pictures willy nilly but not sure if that is legal....
Please don't take the below as legal advice but here're a few short principles.
  1. Any published work (including what you can find on the internet) has a copyright.
  2. This prevents anyone but the copyright holder from copying, republishing or redistributing this materials without an express license.
  3. There is something called fair use or fair dealing which provides exceptions for personal use, commentary and educational purposes. See here:http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use

This means you can use some parts of copyrighted with your students as long as you don’t distribute it later or don’t use too much (e.g. you can copy a page or a picture out of a page but not the whole book or article, or movie clip but not the whole movie - the precise details depend on the country you’re in.)

To avoid any confusion, I only use works that are licensed under Creative Commons (CC). These are still copyrighted but the creator/author decided to explicitly licence them. There are three CC licences:

BY - By Attribution - you must credit the original creator but otherwise you can do anything with the work - including changing it and/or selling it

NC - Non-Commercial - you can do anything as long as it’s for non-commercial purposes

ND - No derivative works - you can redistribute it (and perhaps sell it as long as it’s not NC) but you cannot modify it

These can be combined so you see BY-ND, BY-NC or BY-ND-NC.

The last one is PD which stands for Public Domain and contains no restrictions.

To find pictures or video/audio clips that are CC licensed, I like to use http://search.creativecommons.org which searches other sites for items marked for reuse under CC.

For free licensed audio clips, I use http://www.freesound.org.

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