Legal Considerations
If you want to publish your teaching materials, for example as OER on the OpenLearnWare platform (OLW) , you should always consider the following legal aspects:
- the copyright that exists in your own created work (what was conceived by me?)
- the copyrights that exist in the third-party works , which you have included in your teaching material (what has been elicited/created by another person?)
- and the conditions under which you may include third-party works at all.
Protection of One's Own Work
If you have decided to publish your work on the OpenLearnWare platform, for example, this does not mean that strangers can simply use your work freely. This is your copy right !
The use of your work is generally dependent on the extent of permission granted by you as the creator. If someone exceeds the scope of your permission, this constitutes an infringement of your copyright and you can take legal action against that person.
The intention of publishing on the OpenLearnWare platform is to make your own teaching material available as an Open Educational Resource (OER) In this sense, it should be legally possible for others to use your material. For this purpose, it is necessary that you grant others the right to use your work
- either by the express granting of permission or
- by granting licences, such as Creative Commons (CC) licences.
Creative Commons (CC) licences are easy for users to understand and can be easily put together by you as a creator using the modular principle.
The TU Darmstadt recommends the use of the Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA for the publication of your teaching material on the OpenLearnWare platform.
Protection of the Third Party's Work
If you take someone else's work and want to work with it, you must observe the existing copyrights and possibly ancillary copyrights.
The use of another's work must be done in the correct form in order not to have to answer legally for the infringement of copyrights or ancillary copyrights.
Conditions for the Inclusion of Third-Party Works
If you have also included third-party works in your work, at least one of the following conditions should be met in order for you to be able to publish your own work:
- You use the foreign works within the framework of the right of citation. In doing so, observe the limits of freedom of citation!
- You have obtained individual permission to use from the copyright or neighbouring rights holder. Find out which rights of use a licence should contain
- You have received a licence from the author or copyright holder, e.g., the person has published the work on the Internet under a Creative Commons (CC) licence .
