Resources for teachers: Copyright

To help reduce our copyright costs and the risk of infringement, where possible:

• Link or embed online content - these are not copyright activities
• Use Open Education Resources
• Use Creative Commons content
• Label all content

What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that provides 6 different licences to authors and creators of work to enable flexibility in the way they share their work. Works can be:

• Copied
• Distributed
• Displayed or performed publicly
• Format shifted eg converted from a hard copy to electronic form

Creative Commons licensed works will usually have a label attached similar to the one shown below:

For an explanation of the different Creative Commons licences, visit What is Creative Commons? (Smartcopying). When searching for multi-media content, it is recommended that you use Creative Commons content where possible.

Finding Creative Commons content

Use the following site to find Creative Commons content: Creative Commons Search

If you need more information regarding copyright, ask one of the Hutchins Teacher Librarians or view the Copyright Basics for Teachers presentation that was delivered to teachers in 2015.

Our educational licence allows us to copy content for educational purposes. However, there are limits to how much can be copied. The licence allows us to copy:

Open education resources are teaching, learning and research materials that are in the public domain and include materials such as worksheets, simulations, lesson plans and tests.  There are a number of advantages in using these types of resources:

• They are free
• Remix/adapting is permitted
• Copyright infringement is less likely
• They are high quality
• Suitable for Kindergarten-Year 12 and cover all subject areas

Smartcopying provides a list of recommended repositories of Open Education Resources

For copyright compliance and to reduce copyright costs, all content needs to be labelled (referenced) appropriately.

Labelling course material created by teachers
Include the following information in the footer of each page:

• Copyright symbol
• Name of the organisation (The Hutchins School)
• Year of publication

For example: © The Hutchins School, 2014

For examples of how to label different types of content visit Labelling School Material (Smartcopying).