Intellectual property and licences

Explain in your own words what copyright is and state who holds it in each case, justifying your answer: a drawing you made yourself, a photo you took of a monument, and a song by a famous band that you recorded with your phone at a concert.

You draw a comic strip in your notebook and do not write any licence or the © symbol. Explain what protection that drawing has by default, why it does not need to be registered or marked for it to be yours, and what advantage adding a Creative Commons licence would have if you want to share it.

Creative Commons licences use four symbols: BY, NC, SA, and ND. Match each symbol with its condition — attribution, non-commercial use, share-alike, no derivative works — and explain with an example what each one allows and prohibits.

The diagram ranks several ways of protecting a work, from the most restrictive to the most open, but one step is missing.

Propose a Creative Commons licence that fits into the missing step and justify its position on the ladder by comparing it with its neighbours.

The figure shows the four symbols that make up Creative Commons licences.

Using the legend in the figure, explain what each of these three licences allows and requires: CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC and CC BY-ND. Then choose one of them for the drawings in the class newspaper and justify your choice.

A photo displays the symbol © and the phrase "all rights reserved". Explain what this means in practice: what another person can do with that photo without asking for permission, what they cannot do and what the correct way is to be able to use it.

Explain what the public domain is and at what point works enter it (a long time after the death of their author). Give an example of a classic work that is already in the public domain and explain what can be done with it without asking for permission.

Your group is preparing a website about the history of your municipality and finds three resources: 1) a current photo of a monument taken from a blog with no mention of a license, 2) a municipal map from 1780 digitised by the historical archive, and 3) a song licensed under CC BY-NC. Two opposing opinions arise within the team: "on the internet, anything can be used if we cite the source" and "we can't use anything because everything is copyrighted". Prove why both ideas are false by analysing what you can and cannot do legally with each of the three resources according to their rights regime.

To attribute a CC BY licensed photo properly, you must state the author, the title of the work, the licence and the source link. These details are in jumbled order: "CC BY 4.0", "Sunset at the port", "www.bancofotos.ejemplo/atardecer", "Fátima Ferrer". Put them in order to create a complete attribution and explain why something is missing if you only include the author's name.

You want to illustrate the class blog and you find three images: (a) an image-bank photo with a CC BY licence, (b) a digital newspaper photo with the © symbol and (c) an illustration with a CC BY-NC licence. Explain what you can and cannot do with each one on the blog and what information you must include when using it.

A "derivative work" is a new creation made from an existing one: a translation, a remix or a collage. Explain why the ND (no derivative works) condition prohibits these uses and decide what you could and could not do with a CC BY-ND photo: publish it as it is while crediting the author, crop it, apply a filter to it or use it in a collage.

A student copies three sentences from a web page and pastes them into their work without indicating anything, changing just two words. Explain what plagiarism is and why this way of working is plagiarism, and rewrite the example passage showing how the source would be cited correctly.

The NC condition prohibits commercial use, but the line is not always clear. Analyse these three cases and decide whether they comply with a CC BY-NC image, giving your reasons: (a) using it on a personal blog that displays ads, (b) using it in the PTA magazine that is sold to fund a school trip and (c) using it in a non-profit class project.

To create atmosphere in a class video about World War II, a classmate inserts 15 seconds of a famous soundtrack in the background and claims: "It's legal because it lasts less than 30 seconds, I put the author in the credits, and it's for a school assignment, so the right of quotation applies." Justify why their claim is legally incorrect by analysing the actual purpose required by law to apply the right of quotation, and propose two different legal alternatives to add sound to the video.