We’ll introduce the basics of licenses in this article
In this segment of the Sourcing Series, we’re introducing the concept of licenses and copyright. Besides needing them to drive, licenses allow us to use or reuse data, images, media, and a whole host of other things online. The reason we need licenses though is because of copyright, which is a legal protection of materials. We’ll provide some background on licenses and copyright to help you learn more.
Here at the Data Literacy Program (DLP) we seek out and share images, data sets, and other media, in our Data Stories and other products that have licenses. And more specifically, licenses that allow sharing, reuse, and remixing. If you’ve played through our Data Story FAIR Finds, you’re familiar with licenses. And, if you haven’t played FAIR Finds yet, take a few minutes to do so!
Here’s an excerpt from FAIR Finds that discusses the implication of a specific license (Dennis and Przystupa 2024)
So, why do you need a license to use online materials? Licenses are (in a legal sense) the permissions that allow us to share, reuse, remix, and alter copyright protected materials and data in certain ways. They clearly state exactly what a material may or may not be used for.
People need to know that because most “creative works” (including research articles and data) are automatically granted copyright once they’re created (especially in the United States). That means as soon as you commit something to a medium, for example writing in a google document or drawing on a piece of paper, the United States government grants you copyright as the creator of that piece.
But what’s copyright? Copyright is a type of property right that grants the copyright owner (usually the creator or author but not always!) control over how their work(s) get sold, shared, used, or adapted. The intention of copyright is to allow people who earn a living through creativity to actually benefit from the labor they put in.
However, in practicality it works mainly to protect commercial interests, in a sort of creativity-as-commodity system. Often those commercial interests are mass media producers rather than smaller creators. If you want to find out more about copyright in general in the United States, we’d start here.
While things like facts and methods can’t be copyrighted, almost everything else can. This means that basic familiarity with copyright is essential when using, reusing, or linking to existing materials in your work. For DLP products, we tend to avoid unlicensed or ambiguously licensed copyrighted materials.
That doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just means they have restrictions on their use. Or the ability to use them is unclear. Generally, this means they require us to request or negotiate permission before using them. Requesting permission, necessary to use explicitly copyrighted materials in most contexts, can be time consuming or require paying licensing fees. That makes them difficult for many people and most nonprofits to use.
However, copyright is not absolute. Under a concept known as “fair use” people can use or reuse copyrighted material without the permission of copyright owners in a limited capacity. Fair use allows satire, criticism, and discussion of works, especially for educational and research purposes. We operated under the fair use doctrine when we incorporated copyrighted book covers in our Book Club Videos because we used them for educational critique and discussion. You can see an example below.
While much of the DLP’s work could fall under that doctrine, fair use can be ambiguous. Instead, we source materials with licenses that clearly state what we can and cannot use them for. In our next Sourcing Series segment, we’ll discuss Public Domain and Creative Commons as two examples of those explicit licenses. So if you want to learn more, check out our next entry in the Sourcing Series!
