Production - Licensing

As the previous section noted, you retain ownership of films you submit to SciCast. For us to publish them, you have to give us your explicit permission, by agreeing to a publication license.

The licenses we’re using are international, widely-used, and intended for exactly this sort of circumstance. They come from the Creative Commons project, and are about as simple as this stuff gets. There are other benefits to using them too, which we’ll come to in a minute.

Also, all the normal protections of UK (or Irish) copyright law apply — so you have recourse if your film is used to bring you into disrepute, for example. We can’t quite see how that would happen, but there you go.

OK, hold onto your seats, here come the licenses:

Creative Commons License Terms — Attribution

The simplest form of Creative Commons license is the ‘Attribution’ license, sometimes referred to as ‘BY.’ This stipulates that anyone is free:

to Share: to copy, distribute and transmit your work
to Remix: to adapt your work (that is: to use parts of your film in other projects)

Provided:

Attribution: the original author must be given credit.

That’s it. Well, there’s a teeny bit more — for the full text, see the following:

We’d like everyone to agree to these terms, because they allow us not only to publish your films, but to distribute them as widely as possible. However, for the first two years of SciCast we used a more restrictive Creative Commons license, Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike.

When you submit your film, you’ll be asked to choose your license terms. We’re not quite doing this yet, as of December 2008, but will be soon.

Creative Commons License Terms — Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike

Sometimes referred to as ‘BY-NC-SA’, this is one of the most restrictive licenses Creative Commons offers. Your film is more carefully protected than if it’s published under an Attribution license, but we won’t be able to pass it on to some of our distribution partners, who are technically commercial organisations.

The terms are exactly the same as for Attribution license. Anyone is free:

to Share: to copy, distribute and transmit your work
to Remix: to adapt your work (that is: to use parts of your film in other projects)

The conditions are a little different, however:

Attribution: The original author must be given credit.
Non-Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share-Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license to this one.

Again, there’s a little itsy-bitsy teeny bit more, see the following links for the full text in your region:

Why we’re not just imposing one license for everyone

Currently, as of December 2008, that’s exactly what we are doing, and have done from the start. We picked the carefully-protective Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license.

…and now we’re having to contact loads of people who’ve submitted terrific films, asking them specifically if they’ll agree to us distributing their films to a company who’ll show them on hundreds of screens in schools across the country, and to another organisation who have huge screens in big civic squares in cities across the UK (oh, OK — that second one is the BBC. Yes, we’re quite excited too).

Now, we could switch to the broader Attribution license for all new films, but there are two problems with that. Firstly, that would limit the sorts of material you could include from others in your film (see the next section on using photos, video, and music). Secondly, we’d like to offer you the choice. It’s really pretty straightforward:

Would you like your film distributed as widely as possible, so more people see it? If so, pick the Attribution license, but be aware that (in principle) somebody could make money out of your film.
— or —
Would you like your film protected as much as possible, even if that limits its use to others and the size of the audience that might see it? If so, pick the Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license.

Tricky choice, eh? Well, life’s full of them, and at least here there’s no right or wrong answer.

Why we’re inflicting this stuff on you at all

We’re insisting on proper licenses partly so we’re on firm legal ground, but also because, these days, almost all of us are publishers. In a typical classroom around half the students will have a Bebo or Myspace page, or a blog, or will publish their photos or videos. It’s increasingly important that we understand our rights and responsibilities, and getting SciCast licensing right is a small contribution towards that.

Creative Commons is also a widespread global movement that’s collectively building publicly-available, reusable resources. That sounds like a good idea to us, and we’re proud to be contributing so much high-quality science video.

Finally, because Creative Commons resources are reusable, you get to use other peoples’ work in yours, which helps solve another problem: using music and stills. Onward to the next section!