Finding Media

Open licensing refers to any of the multiple sets of legal tools that allow authors and other creators to proactively grant permission for others to use copyrighted work of any type. These tools are in the form of licenses that are attached to the copyrighted work. The license defines the permissions you are allowing for others to reuse your work.

Open licenses can be applied to just about anything you create, including written documents, datasets, images, audio or video files, computer software, and more.

Merely making your work openly and freely available does not automatically mean that others can legally reuse, repurpose, copy, republish, remix, or otherwise use your work. Copyright law protects all creative work from the moment it is published or "fixed" in any medium. Under copyright law, the only way to reuse published materials is to request permission from the creator or copyright holder, which can be a frustrating and time-consuming process. Open licensing was created to simplify the permissions process by proactively granting certain pre-defined permissions. Once an open license is attached to a work, others do not need to request permission to reuse the work in any of the pre-defined use cases.

All you need to do is select the license that best meets your needs or requirements and attach it to your work, usually by copying and pasting a snippet of code provided by the licensing organization. Then anybody can reuse or reproduce your work under the terms you specified on your license without formally asking you for your permission. For other use cases not covered by your license, others will still need to request explicit permission from you as the copyright holder.

For example, if you look at the bottom of this page, you’ll see that this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC) Share and Share Alike Non-commercial license. That means we are proactively granting others our permission to reuse or reproduce any part of this guide so long as they credit us, assign the same CC license to their work, and are not selling the product they produce. So, if a librarian at, say, the University of Chicago wants to reproduce this guide for their own library’s website, they already have our permission and don’t need to contact us. Same for a teacher who wants to reproduce this as part of their course material. However, if an author wants to reproduce this guide as part of a book they intend to sell, that is not allowed under our CC license. In this case they would have to contact us to negotiate permissions.

Open licenses do not replace copyright. They streamline the process for granting permission for others to reuse or reproduce your copyrighted work. Copyright applies whether you assign a license or not. Under current copyright law, anything you write or record in a fixed medium is automatically copyrighted, even without the © copyright symbol.

Creative Commons (CC) is is one of the most widely used licensing systems in the world. Its licenses can be applied to any type of creative work, regardless of the medium in which it was created or distributed. To select a CC license, visit the Creative Commons website at https://creativecommons.org/choose/.

For licensing computer code, there are literally dozens of options, including Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT, and Mozilla to name a few. Like Creative Commons, they all consist of a set of legal tools that allow developers and researchers to proactively grant others the permission to reuse, alter, or adapt their code.

While all of these are used for licensing code, some are also used for other computer-related materials including images, audio or video files, help files, user guides, or other written documentation. Some researchers have even used them for licensing published research papers or shared data, especially in computer science and related fields, but this practice is unusual—Creative Commons is more often used for these purposes.

The Open Source Initiative has a listing of known licenses at https://opensource.org/licenses/category