Correctly licensing content is a vital but sometimes overlooked part of small to medium local heritage projects. We have put together this guide which covers everything we wished we knew when we started work on The Towers, a local history project based in Oldham, UK.
It explains what Creative Commons is (and why it is important), and where and when it can be applied. It explains how to appropriately credit lots of different types of content that you might gather for your heritage project. It also offers some practical templates and wordings to help you do this work.
We hope you find it useful — if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact [email protected]
Correctly attributing work is important, both to protect yourself from potentially expensive claims by creators (if you use their work without authorisation), and the admin burden of having to deal with said claims. It is also vitally important to set best practice around respecting the work and ideas of people who contribute to your project. If you find their work valuable enough to include, you should respect them enough to credit it appropriately, and not use work without first seeking and receiving authorisation.
If your project has been funded, you may also find that applying appropriate credits to all content is a vital stipulation of the terms of your funding.
Correctly licensing works in ‘the commons’ (more on that later) is also a wonderful and important way of fostering dissemination of exciting content to a much wider audience, and opens many doors for creativity and collaboration.
“Creative commons” is a type of licence applied to work when the author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon their work.
Creative Commons is also the international non-profit organisation who oversee and write the various CC licences. They say that creative commons is important because it:
“…empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture we need to address the world’s most pressing challenges and create a brighter future for all.”
When receiving Heritage Lottery grants (and grants from some other funders), it is often stipulated that any outputs must be shared under a CC licence. This guide focusses on understanding Creative Commons from that perspective.
Whenever you create any kind of work — photography, writing, drawing, film, music, theatre, screenplays or almost any other type of originally created content, you can choose what licence is applied to it. The general default is ‘copyright’. You get copyright protection automatically — you don’t have to apply or pay a fee. If you want to assert your copyright, you should apply the copyright symbol (©) to your work, and note your name and the year of creation.
Copyright prevents other people from copying your work, distributing copies of it (whether free or for sale), performing or displaying your work, or adapting your work. (However it is important to note that there is no list of copyrighted works in the UK, and pursuing any copyright concerns is entirely dependent on you hearing about them and making contact with the offender yourself).
In most countries copyright will last for the rest of your life and 70 years beyond.