Pub101 for Authors: Copyright, Licenses, Remixes, and Fair Use

This week's session of Pub101 for Authors delves into the complexities of open publishing, including copyright, licenses, remixes, and fair use. In her presentation, Christine Rickabaugh of the University of Arkansas defines "open" vs. "free to use," outlines the challenges of remixing content, and shares points authors need to know about using third-party tools or images in open textbooks. She also provides helpful resources and practical support for navigating open licenses. Hosted by Jessica McClean of the University of Texas at Arlington.

Watch the video recording of this April 15, 2026, session or keep reading for a full transcript.

Jessica: Welcome, everyone to today's Open Education Network's Pub 101 for Authors session. Thanks for joining us. My name's Jessica McClean. I'm the Director of Reference, Instruction, and Open Education at the University of Texas at Arlington, and I'm today's host and facilitator.

Today, I'm going to be handing it off to our colleague, Christine Rickabaugh from the University of Arkansas to talk about copyright licenses, remixes, and fair use. We will have time at the end for questions and conversations. So please, as you're going through and hearing the presentation, drop your comments in chat and we'll hold those until the end. There may be some of you who have experience with this topic, so we invite you to share your experiences and resources in the chat as well.

So some housekeeping details. These sessions complement our Pub 101 for Author's curriculum and related resources. Today's session is related to unit one, so I'll share the link to that in the chat. Make sure that it's looking okay. That looks fine. We do have an orientation document that shares our schedule and links to session slides, and recordings. I know that this is kind of a big link, but I'll go ahead and drop that in there as well for you to follow up on later. And then we are committed to providing a friendly and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. So please join us in creating a constructive space.

So to kick off today's conversation, we have a brief reflective question, and that is, what does open mean for you in the context of sharing your teaching or research? Does it mean free or editable or public or something else? I'll drop that question in the chat, but if you would like to respond in the chat, we can take a look at a couple of answers. If anyone wants to raise their hand and respond out loud, we would love to hear from you.

Matt: I guess I will go. Matt Evans here for Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, just up the street from Christine. For me, Open addresses how the particular object that you're creating in one context can travel outside that immediate context for student assignments. Maybe they're producing something that's useful for future class, for something I'm creating that's paper or infographic or something else.

It can be in a repository, it can be remixed with another object, it can be used in another class that's not going to be having some paywall block people's access to it. It just has that value in a new context. That's what I would say, building off of something that Edward Said said a long time ago about how text and meanings can travel from different contexts.

Jessica: Great. Thank you so much. Any other thoughts on this question? What does open mean for you when thinking about sharing your teaching or research? Okay. Gary in the chat says, "Definitely free for my own students, maybe public if I get up the nerve to share outside. I'm probably too much ego involved to make it editable." In quotes, "I did it this way because it's the right way and I don't want others to change it, but maybe I'll grow out of that."

I think that's definitely something I hear a lot from people who get a little nervous about putting their work out there. Well, we will go ahead and pass things on to Christine to start talking about copyright and licensing, but keep that question in mind as you hear this presentation, and hopefully you'll learn something new about copyright and licensing today. So take it away, Christine.

Christine: Okay. So, hi everybody. I am Christine Rickabaugh. I am the open education librarian here at the University of Arkansas, and I'm going to be talking about copyright, licenses, remixes, and fair use, which is just a mouthful and a half. So we'll get started.

So our learning objectives today, we're aiming for to talk about the difference between "open" and "free to use." We'll talk a little bit about licensing and applying Creative Commons licenses. We'll talk about identifying a license, attribution, and compatibility when you're revising or remixing that openly licensed content. And then identify some practical supports for navigating open licenses, 'cause it is a complicated, often feels like it's ever shifting topic. Quick disclaimer, I am not a lawyer. I cannot provide legal advice. I am a librarian who spends a lot of time thinking about copyright. So, my goal here is to equip you with the best practice and advice I can offer, but I am not copyright. I'm not a lawyer, so just kind of throwing that out there.

So, why does copyright matter? That's kind of the first piece. And so you want to think about how copyright can create barriers for remixing and how licenses can reduce those barriers. So basically, what is copyright? It's the automatic legal protection. I know up until the late '80s, things had to be registered with a copyright office or you had to put the copyright logo on your things for it to be copyrighted. That is no longer the case. That changed in, I believe, 1988.

At this point, if you create something and it is in a fixed, tangible or digital space, it is applicable for copyright. That gives creators the exclusive right to produce their work, to create derivatives, to distribute copies, and to publicly display or perform their work. And when we think about specifically that distribute copies, that plays in very heavily to open education and what we do, because the goal is to share copies of your or other people's work with our students, or with learners and the world in general.

So, why this matters for us as textbook authors is the default. As I said, that copyright is automatically applied to anything once it's in a fixed format, is you can't legally use or remix or adapt someone else's work without permission, with the exception of fair use, which we'll talk about later. You should know anything in copyright, there's always a... Except for, just assume there's always going to be an except four, but duration is long.

Right now, the duration for copyright is the life of the author plus 70 years. If it's corporate, it can be up to 100 years. And these are just the United States guidelines. Mexico has more like life of an author plus 100. In order to sign the treaty that made this a piece, made this global, you had to have at least life of the author plus 70 years. And if it's a group of authors, it is the life of the last living author plus 70 years. So, it can be a very varied thing. It applies to everything, text, images, videos, diagrams, graphs. And so you need clear permission. So free to view does not mean the same as free to edit or remix. So when we think about our students who go online and they find an article that they want to read, it may be free to read, but that doesn't mean they can download it, distribute it, or remix it. That's a different set of pieces.

So when we talk about licenses, the example I always use with my students that seems to strike the best is a local movie theater does not have the copyright to a major film. Instead, the movie studio has granted that local theater, your AMC theater down the street, a license to use that work. So when we think about what is a license, it grants you specific permissions. Sometimes it's written, sometimes it's verbal, sometimes it's digital. But with a license, the copyright holder is saying, "You can do X, Y, and Z." So that major movie theater or major movie studio might say, "You can show our movie, but the theater needs to be 60% sold and you need to charge X, Y, or Z for a ticket." Without that license, your local movie theater can't show that movie. They can't copy it, they can't remix it.

So when we're thinking about copyright and textbooks, or copyrights and educational materials overall, that's where we get into the copying, the remixing, the revising, that with a license. Specifically in this case, we're talking about Creative Commons licenses, but in general, without a license, you have to assume default copyright protection exists.

So, what makes something open that we can do? 'Cause we're talking about open education. So, when something's open, at least in our specific definition, that means it's probably licensed under a Creative Commons license. There are a couple of other types of licenses that are specific to software or other things, but the Creative Commons are the ones that we end up dealing with the most, and they explicitly grant the rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.

So when we're talking about open education as a general guideline, you can assume you can do all of those things. Again, there's always an exception that we'll get to, but just that's kind of your basic guidance, is you can always retain it, you can always reuse it, and you can always redistribute it. Even the most restrictive Creative Commons license allows those things. Whether or not you can revise it or remix it is where it gets a little more iffy.

But anytime you've got an open access article or an open textbook, you can retain it, you can download it, and you can share it with your students, which is part of what I think is really valuable because who hasn't had a resource that's gone missing? It gets taken offline or whatever. And you spend the rest of your teaching career thinking about that YouTube list of the letter L, songs that you didn't get to use when you taught summer school. Not that that's a personal life example.

But with this license, it's intentional. The author or the publisher has to choose to make it open, and you have to say it. You have to document it. So for example, on the first slide of this slideshow, there was a CC BY and C license that clearly says that that is how this presentation is licensed. That's the one I chose. Free to use could mean that it's free of cost, but that doesn't mean you can retain, redistribute, remix. There's no documented license.

Maybe you have permission, but it's not documented, it's unclear. And so using it beyond reading the article on the website may violate copyright. Most important thing out of this slide, out of this presentation, you ready? When in doubt, assume all rights are reserved. You're always going to be safer if you're not sure if something is openly licensed if you treat it as though it is, as though it is all rights reserved, 'cause you can then think about it in terms of fair use and other pieces. But if you just assume all rights reserved, then you're never going to violate anyone else's guidance. You're always respecting the creator of this content, which is why it's on a slide all by itself.

So moving on, there's all of these different terms and phrases that we use when we're talking about copyright. And one of the ones that we hear the most is public domain. When something's public domain, it's truly free. They don't have copyright protection. That's why they're in the public domain. For us in the United States, that's most works published before 1930. Many federal government documents.

States go different ways depending on what your state guidance and your state legislature has chosen. Works that the author has deliberately placed in the public domain. So they have put a license on it. Usually, they mark it as public domain or they'll call it a CC0 license, saying that there are no restrictions. Again, that expired copyright.

Now, best practice, even though it's in the public domain, is still to cite the author and the original work. That's just more in terms of ethics and thinking about how we want to demonstrate life for our students. But once it's in a public domain... So for example, if you think about that horrid Winnie the Pooh horror movie that came out a few years ago, that was because Winnie the Pooh, the character, moved into the public domain. And so those movie creators were allowed to take that character and do something with it that I think we all know the Disney Corporation probably was not a huge fan of.

Within this, there are also pieces that are always free. So, copyright protects the expression, not the idea. So facts, datas, ideas. This is always interesting with math textbooks, because probably it is the examples and the word problems, and the how to or the application pieces that are most likely under copyright because E=MC squared cannot be copyrighted. It is a fact. So it's usually, again, one of those gray areas. I'm going to use the word gray a lot in this presentation.

So, thinking about that exact wording can be a really big piece. If you're thinking about how you're laying things out, your approach to a textbook, you may want to be thinking about, "Yes, I really like how that publisher created this content." What are you doing to put your own spin on it to make sure that those facts, those ideas that you want to represent are done in a slightly different or a more unique way that fits so that you're not violating their copyright?

Another term you've heard me use a lot is fair use. This is an interesting one. As practitioners, lots of times I hear faculty say, "Oh, but it's under fair use." So, when we're talking about OER and that all rights reserved, and I said it's always better to assume everything's all rights reserved, unless you know specifically that it isn't. You can use all rights reserved content in OER. However, that assumes that whoever takes your material knows how to use things under fair use.

It means it's slightly less adoptable, flexible, if it's using all rights reserved than if it's something that's fully open. So, our recommendation from the OEN is usually, when in doubt, to link to something that' you're using under fair use versus actually embedding it in your Pressbook, your LibreText, your Kultura, your Google Drive, whatever you're using. It just makes it a little bit cleaner. And then also from an accessibility standpoint, things are always more accessible if they're in their original digital container.

So, when you're thinking about fair use, and this is one I get from faculty a lot, there are four factors, the nature of the work. So how creative is it versus how much fact or ideas are being represented? The amount used, this matters. You'll find a lot of libraries who have a strict 20%, 25% kind of guidance for course reserves or ILL. The actual law doesn't have a specific number. You have to balance all four of these pieces together.

So the market impact. For example, if something's in the public domain, there is no market impact, so you can use as much as you'd like. For example, that's why you'll see Disney, maybe they can use a two-second clip or a TV show. Lots of times our global campus uses movie posters instead of actual shots of the movie because those don't impact the market value of the movie if they need to reference that.

And then what's the purpose of the use? "Are we making money? Are we creating parody or criticism? Or more likely we're using it for educational use." So just because it's educational doesn't mean you can use the whole kit and kaboodle, but it may mean that you can use sections here and sections here to illustrate your point without showing the entire movie or chapter of a book, or story, or whatever kind of content you have. I'm trying to keep this as broad as possible. I'm going to take just a second there. Are there any burning questions?

Jessica: There are no burning questions in the chat for now.

Christine: Okay. Is everyone saying, "She's talking entirely too fast"?

Jessica: Nope. Just commenting about what you were talking about with Winnie the Pooh.

Christine: Okay. Good deal. I just wanted to make sure 'cause I know this is a lot of content that I'm putting at you guys really fast.

Jessica: I do hear someone. Yeah, there's a question.

Dulce: Sorry.

Jessica: Yes.

Dulce: Yeah, really quickly. I'm a language teacher, so therefore a lot of what I might get from a lot of books is vocabulary lists. So if I am doing, I don't know, or uses of..., I might go through books that are actually from publishing houses like McGraw Hill or whatever, ...and then look at what the book or list they have to determine which ones I would like to use. But I'm just copying, well, not copying, but compiling lists of words for different things. Is that copyrighted? Thank you.

Christine: So I would say, now again, not a lawyer, but how I advise my authors is that the vocabulary isn't copyrighted. How you present it, how you're teaching students to use it, what kinds of stories or case studies, that's the presentation that could be copyrightable, but simply saying that the word for girl is mademoiselle would not be copyrighted. So, you want to think about the idea versus how it's presented, and the idea or the word can't be copyrighted, but the way that you're presenting it may be.

Dulce: Thank you so much.

Christine: Okay, good. So okay, we've gotten through fair use. We're doing well. So, you found something, it is an openly licensed resource you are excited to use, but how do you tell people it's an openly licensed resource? If you take a look at the bottom of any of the pictures in my slideshow, you'll see an example of how they do this. We call it TASL, and it means that you're going to tell people the name, the title, the author, the source, and the license.

And whenever possible, you want to link to the original source or the author's author page, LinkedIn page, whatever they have tied to their work. And this just becomes a really nice, consistent way to tell everyone what you have, who created it, where you got it, and what kind of license works. So for example, a lot of these images I got from Wikimedia, because you wouldn't notice, but these are all pictures from the campuses of the various people on the Pub 101 Committee.

So there are University of Minnesota, there is the Ohio State University, there is Texas at Arlington, and there's University of Arkansas. So all of these different pictures come. So you'll see the name of the item. If you were to click on the PowerPoint, you would find the Wikipedia page for the photographer, and then however the license is done. So that if you wanted to use these pictures, you would understand what guidance you have on any of those.

So that is called, we call it TASL, title, author, source, and license. And obviously if this was a print piece, I would probably type out the actual hyperlink versus hyperlinking them in a PowerPoint or a digital piece where you can hyperlink.

And then there's the example, title, author is licensed under. You could access it at and then do the source URL. I just hyperlinked. It's usually cleaner in a PowerPoint. And when in doubt in terms of accessibility, having a meaningful name instead of the full spelled out link is a better choice.

So Creative Commons licenses. Okay. We've got a couple of different pieces. Basically, you want to think about a Creative Commons license in saying "Yes," instead of, "All rights reserved." But what are those rights? If we think about it as the movie theater again, what are you as the movie studio saying the user needs to do?

Our most open, other than public domain, is a CC BY, which just means you need to give attribution to the creator. So you can remix things, you can revise them. This is a really good option, particularly when you're thinking about textbooks or course sets, because they can be easily remixed and revised with other things so that they fit pedagogically with what you're aiming for in terms of resources.

The next two are attribution. So they're CC BY, but they have an extra little piece. Either they're asking you to share a like, which is the one with the little arrow, just like CC BY, but they're saying, "Whatever you create from this, please share it openly as well."

Actually, they're not saying, "Please share." They're saying, "Share it openly as well." So this is like a way of saying, "Please pass it on. Keep this going." The one on the bottom is NonCommercial. So you could have a CC BY-NC. This is what I choose. I just don't want someone commercializing my work.

So that's, basically, it can't be used commercially. You can't make money off it. It could limit textbook use if you're thinking about using it from a publisher perspective, but I don't think it has much implications in most scenarios within the open education world.

A couple less common creative licenses is a CC BY-NC-ND. Now, you can have an item that is a CC BY-ND, and ND means No Derivatives. This is an interesting license in the world of open ed because not everyone would say that this is an open license because it doesn't allow for that remixing and that revising. I like to note that one. If I have authors that are really skittish, I might recommend this as a license, particularly if they are really tied to some of their work, because it still allows it to be shared with others, but it's really more free to read and redistribute and less so to be revised or remixed, which also means if you're thinking about the best actors in open ed, they can't change it to fit the context of their readers or their students.

In my experience, folks who are bad actors are going to use your materials without your permission, whether or not there's a Creative Commons license on it. They're not going to go, "Oh, there's a Creative Commons license. Well, I'll take that." That's just not really how certain people in our world work. And then, again, we've got that public domain license, that idea that it could be put on something that has expired copyright or something that you want to dedicate that you're like, "I don't even need attribution. I want you to be able to go and do whatever it is you'd like with my work." Yes, ethics still apply. It would be nice. We want to make sure that we're citing those whenever possible. We want to set that example for those who see our work, but they're not required in the same CC BY kind of way.

Okay, it's application time. Are you ready? Our first scenario, we're going to have three total where you can use this and think about. So scenario one, these come from Amanda Larson at The Ohio State University. She shared these licensing scenarios with me, so you'll see my TASL at the bottom.

Robert is a graduate teaching assistant in the history department and serves as the instructor of record for several courses. He has created all his teaching materials, including slides and handouts. He hopes these materials will be used in future course offerings, and he also wants to share them widely to build his scholarly and teaching portfolio. He needs to receive credit for the work when it's used, but like some of the people on this call, he's nervous about making changes to it without his approval.

So, if you were instructing Robert, which would you suggest for him? And then there's kind of on the right is like a mini cheat sheet guide on these different licenses. So, you can unmute or if you want to put it in the chat, which license would you recommend? Sorry, that's what happens when I play with my mouse. What would you guys say?

Jessica: We have a couple suggestions in the chat so far. Matthew says CC BY-ND. Christopher says CC BY-NC. Gary is suggesting CC BY-NC-ND.

Christine: Yeah. And any other thoughts from the group? I don't want to cut anyone off just 'cause it took them a second to type. Okay. If I were advising Robert, I would say either CC BY-NC, or excuse me, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND, NonCommercial-NonDerivative, or simply NonDerivative, because it sounds like what his big concern is having people change his work without his approval.

Now, if you license something CC BY-ND and someone comes to you and says, "I really want to make this change to it," could you grant them a one-time license to do that? Absolutely. That's an option. Or he could go with a NonCommercial-NonDerivative or just a NonDerivative, 'cause it sounds like that's more his concern, not people making money off of his work.

Okay. Scenario number two, Talia. She's unhappy with the content and price of commercial textbooks that she's reviewed for her course. She's decided instead to create her own textbook for the course using teaching materials that she has compiled and revised over the years. She'd love to see it adopted by other instructors, and believes it's important that they can edit the materials to suit their courses. What kind of license would you recommend for Talia?

Jessica: Okay. Couple comments in the chat. Courtney is suggesting CC BY-NC. Gary's suggesting CC BY.

Christine: And yeah, I'd say either of those would be great fits. Again, CC BY is going to give you the most option. So if Talia really wants things to travel a distance, CC BY is going to be a good choice. I think she could do CC BY-NC, or CC BY ShareAlike would also be an option. Any of those would allow her work to travel so that it can be edited to suit the needs of other learners. Really, so long as she doesn't choose something with an ND, she's probably in a good place. She could also do public domain if she wanted.

Okay. Here, we get into a little bit of remixing within licenses. So, you've put together a textbook and you've pulled some chapters from one textbook, you've got an open access article, maybe you've got some things that you've created. How do we put those all together? I like to think of it as a fruit salad versus a smoothie, which is to say when you remix or combine CC licensed materials, the original license still apply to all of those parts. So whatever your new license is, it has to be compatible with the most restrictive license.

However, here's the piece is, are you making a fruit salad or a smoothie? Here's what I mean by that. Is this an edited volume or are you remixing the content in the chapters? If you have a fruit salad where you are keeping everything in its original form and just mixing it together, so think an edited volume, you can leave each chapter as its own license.

If you are making a smoothie where you're mixing up content from different pieces, you're revising things, you're putting together the different scenarios in ways that fit for your students, then you need to choose the most restrictive license, because all those little bits from all of the different pieces have been mixed up together into a smoothie.

So let's take a sec about what this kind of looks like. I have a really nice chart that I find quite helpful. It is a lot of color. It is a lot of check marks, but if you look at it on the top and then on the side, you can see the different types of licenses. So you've got public domain if I'm here on the top left. It can be mixed with another public domain thing. Either way, it can be mixed with a CC BY or a CC BY ShareAlike or a NonCommercial.

Public domain and NoDerivatives, because that NoDerivatives is there, well, you can't mix it with a public domain because you can't mix NoDerivatives. It would work with a NonCommercial ShareAlike, but then that NonCommercial NoDerivatives, again, doesn't really play with anything else. And that's oftentimes why when you talk to open education professionals and we say, "Is a NoDerivatives really an open license or is it a read license?" Because you can't remix.

So I find this to be a really helpful resource, and it is going to be at the end of my slideshow. We'll put the link in the chat, that just kind of helps you think through what you can combine. And again, I think about it a lot like a fruit salad versus a smoothie. Are the pieces staying in their own little lane or are they getting mixed up into something new and different?

Okay. Scenario number three. Dr. Martinez is compiling a custom intro to psychology textbook for her course. She's selecting chapters from different open textbooks to create the perfect fit for her students. So she's got a couple different licenses she's dealing with. She's got chapter two is from a CC BY, chapter five is from a CC BY-SA, chapter eight has an infographic that's CC BY and C, and then she's got her own content as well, so she gets to choose any license she want. What kind of license should Dr. Martinez consider for her custom textbook?

Jessica: Gary in the chat is suggesting CC BY-SA.

Christine: Okay. Not a bad choice. Here's where that detail comes in. Is her collection, is it a collection or is it a remix? That's when you need to have that further conversation with a creator and say, "So Dr. Martinez, are you doing anything with that research methods or that memory chapter, or do they live independent of themselves? Are they a fruit salad or a smoothie?" If it's a fruit salad and she is simply adding those chapters to her original content, she can leave it as a fruit salad. And so she can say, "Chapter two is licensed CC BY. Chapter five is licensed CC BY-SA." If it's a smoothie, if she is taking all of this content and putting it together in her own special way with phrases and ideas, and content from different chapters being mixed together, then she's going to have to use the most restrictive license there, which would actually be a CC BY-NC-SA.

It would be a NonCommercial-ShareAlike because she'd have to take the ShareAlike from one and the NonCommercial from another. Now, that's still open. You can still revise that, you can still remix it, but whatever you do with that would have to go CC BY-NC-SA for future work. It doesn't really slow you down or stops you, but it is something you have to think about when you're putting together resources from multiple places. And so again, if she's integrating or editing chapters, it becomes a remix, so you need that more restrictive license. If she's not changing anything, and really it's just a table of contents, then she can keep each item separate.

Okay. We're wrapping up. We're getting close. What about generative AI? This is a question I get from my faculty every time I talk about copyright. So the official guidance from the US Copyright Office, the last update came from last summer. "Outputs that are created solely by generative AI do not have a human element to them and therefore are not eligible for copyright protection. Merely providing prompts to AI does not count as enough human authorship for copyright eligibility. Using it as an assistive tool does not prevent copyright protection."

I know our fearless leader, Amanda Larson, will be doing more about GenAI in a future session, so I don't want to get too far into it, but it is a question I get asked every time I talk about copyright. So at this point, GenAI is generally considered not eligible for copyright.

And then I've got a few resources that I wanted to share out because I know this was a lot of information very quickly just being thrown at you. And so these are some of my personal favorite go-tos. And I believe Jessica's going to put links to all of these in the chat, if she has not already. But I really recommend if you're kind of newer to the copyright and licensing space, the Choose a License for Your Work by the Creative Commons is really helpful. It allows you to think through in sort of a branching scenario.

Do you know what you need? Are you okay with someone remixing your work? Are you okay with someone using it commercially? And kind of thinking through. And then the Washington Open Attribution Builder is just a really helpful... It'll build it almost like Legos, where you put the different things in and it'll show you what it should look like. And both of those are excellent, although all of these are really good. And that's what I've got.
 
So, what can I explain further for you?

 

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