The video below will provide you with an introduction to copyright, including the purpose of copyright; what is copyrightable and what is not; how a person receives copyright protection for their work; the public domain; and exceptions to copyright like fair use. Since Creative Commons licenses work on top of copyright, it is important to have a basic understanding of copyright to understand them.

Content sources:

Creative Commons. n.d. "CC Certificate Unit 2: Copyright Law." Accessed October 15, 2018. https://certificates.creativecommons.org/about/certificate-resources-cc-by/.

Dictionary.com, s.v. “Trademark,” accessed October 8, 2018, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trademark.

Rathemacher, Andrée, Julia Lovett, and Angel Ferria. “Fair Use and Copyright for Online Education.” LibGuides @ URI. Accessed October 1, 2018. https://uri.libguides.com/fairuse.

United States Copyright Office. Circular 1, Copyright Basics. Accessed October 8, 2018. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf.

Image sources:

Fair use scale by Michael Brewer & ALA Office of Information Technology Policy, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, via The University of Chicago Library

Patent Pending by USPTO, public domain, via The Noun Project

Public Domain Mark by Creative Commons, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

All other images public domain via Pixabay.

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Video created using Screencast-O-Matic and this Google Slides presentation.

This guide was created by URI librarian Andrée Rathemacher in fall 2018 as part of her course assignments for the Creative Commons Certificate.

Andrée Rathemacher, 10/2018-