Open Educational Resources: Licenses

Copyright	Reuse is not permitted. Permission from the owner must be requested.
Creative Commons	The material can be reused citing the author. Consult the different kinds of Creative Commons licenses and their characteristics.
Copyleft	The material can be reused citing the author.
Public Domain	The material can be used without restriction. On citing the resource, you must mention that it is from the public domain.
No license	It is not known whether reuse is permitted. You must request permission from the owner or seek another resource with a license that assures reuse is permitted. .

• More information about intellectual property.
• Do you need to search for information about intellectual property? (only for UC3M members)
• Questions about intellectual property answered

• Guidelines for the creation and publication of audiovisual material at universities

• Creative Commons: the best practices for attribution
• Consult the library’s Referencing guide if you need to cite according to international guidelines (APA, Chicago, IEEE, UNE-ISO 690:2013).

When you look for any resource, you must consult the license to be sure that the resource can be reused and how it can be reused (for example, whether modifications are permitted). It is most advisable to search for resources filtering by licenses that permit their use, but if you have a resource you want to use and you found it somewhere else, you should consult the original source for the license it has.

We do not recommend searching for resources like images in Wikipedia or in Wikimedia, or in blogs or the like, either, because they tend not to be original sources and they might mistake the type of license. Always consult the original source.

If you do not know the legal terms of a resource...

search for the legal terms on the web page where you found it..

Remember that to be sure of lawful use, you should search in the original source, not where third parties have reused it.

When you find a resource on a web page, in a magazine, in an electronic book, etc., consult the terms of use. Normally, they will be mentioned with the license icon (Copyright, Creative Commons, etc.) or will be at the bottom of the web page in a section titled Legal Disclaimer, Terms and Conditions, Copyright, etc.

In the following example, we see that content from a web site cannot be reused without requesting permission. It is only permitted for personal use.