Hello! I am new in the community, and really looking for some advice on copyright to develop a free of cost - curated- online course on digital technologies for teachers.
Embedding youtube and Vimeo videos: If we embed a youtube video on our portal the licence of which is unknown to us but for which embedding code is available and if we mention the source, maker etc, will it be considered copyright infringement? Since the video is still hosted on youtube and not on our portal and a learner will still be watching the advertisements on the video.
Providing weblinks on our MOOC: If we offer links of a website (the content of which is not open licence) on our course will it be considered copyright infringement? Since we are not using their content on our portal but navigating learner to go to the website (hence no loss of advertising revenue).
Basically want to understand guidelines for the course curation…
Thanks a lot in advance.
Typically websites like Youtube and Vimeo provide a custom all rights reserved license with permissions to embed videos on your website as long as you use their approved players. This will not be a breach of copyright because you are embedding the videos in accordance with the license they provide for this purpose.
You will not infringe copyright if you provide hyperlinks to 3rd party websites in your course materials as long a you don’t imply or suggest that these resource links are your property.
Dear Mr. Wayne,
Thank you so very much for your response. It is very helpful indeed.
I believe what you are saying is that with proper acknowledgement and without any edits, we can embed videos and provide links without infringing copyright.
If I may ask another question. Can a course in which we embedd some videos and provide links of non-open-licence content be released as CC BY SA? Provided that with every external resource (like video/weblink) we mention the source and write that the embedded video or the web link is not OER.
Correct -generally you can embed videos and link out to non-open materials. You must also check that you are using the approved player for embedding the videos.
So for example, Youtube provides permissions to show Youtube videos through their embeddable player. This does not change the copyright license of the Youtube videos, so a course site licensed CC-BY-SA would not change copyright license of the video, but you are permitted to embed the video within a CC-BY-SA licensed course.
Thanks a lot Mr. Wayne. Really appreciate your responses.
Since we have created many of our courses without understanding copyright issues fully and are now trying to revisit them, we may have more doubts as we go along. I will continue posting queries on this forum. So glad to have direct access to experts like yourself to guide us. Thank you for your time.