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When you don't commercialize your works

What about grey literature, things you put online, presentations, drafts of articles, datasets, video, software code, and so on?. Things that never get published far exceed the amount we do publish. But the same full copyright protects them. Think about how you like to use others works, then give others the rights you yourself think are reasonable. It's easy. Creative Commons lets you to select a license and associate it with anything you put online. If anyone can find it, the license will quickly and easily specify they are allowed to do with it. This puts your works in the flow of teaching and research, not on the sideline.

Here's an example:

Check out the license at the foot of this page. It says that the original Authors of the Copyright Crash Course retain the right of attribution. This means that even though the content appears within PILOT, we identify the source of the original work and where possible add a link to the original website. You can go to Creative Commons for a clear description of the rights available.

I only had to copy and paste a snippet of code I got from the Creative Commons Website into this page to make the license appear. The snippet does three things: it creates the little image, it links the reader directly to the Creative Commons site for more details about the license and it makes this page visible to the Creative Commons search engines so that people who are looking for reusable materials can easily find it. Very powerful stuff.

So manage

Changing copyright law to better meet academic needs is not likely to happen quickly. But we don't have to change the law. We just have to manage what the law gives us to better serve our own needs. So actively manage your copyrights to put your works in the flow where people can find and use them.