Thinking through your rights and the rights of materials you’re including early in your project can help ensure you’re not the subject of a Copyright Small Claims dispute. It also ensures that people are using and referring to your work in a way that is meaningful to you.
- What does working open mean in the context of your project?
- Are you using open resources?
- Do you want your project to be open?
- Do you have collaborators? If so, how are you crediting their contributions to the project?
- For class projects, consider student privacy.
- If the project will be available publicly, has everyone given permission? How are those permissions documented?
- What materials are you using for your project?
- Do they come from other sources? (ex. Images from books, video/clips someone else created, etc.)
- Do you have permission/rights to reuse this content in your project?
- Are you properly attributing content that is used in your project?
- Did you create them? (ex. Self-taken photos, oral histories you collected, etc.)
- How do you want people to interact with or reuse the materials you create? Consider applying a Creative Commons license to your work.
- For oral histories, podcasts, or digital interviews, do you have permissions from all participants in the project? How are those permissions documented? Where are the permissions stored?