Creative Commons licenses are invaluable for those wishing to develop open content, but, we all know, there's a lot of primo content out there that isn't licensed in such a nice way. If we adopt the open model, can any of this still be used?

Linking

Goods: We all know the goods because, we presume, we all check the internetz relatively often. There is a glut of freely-accessible content online, and we can link to it as long as it's not itself in violation of copyright and we don't mind sometimes directing students to sites that are populated by distracting advertisement. They're used to that, anyway. Just remember that, as always, a work available online isn't necessarily licensed for whatever use you intend. If you want students to read a copyright-restricted work on the web, give them the link and vital info, such as author, title, and publisher.

Bads: Links die. Perhaps this has happened to you and perhaps it hasn't. Still, when we link to an external URL, there is the definite possibility that, at some point or another, that link isn't going to work anymore. This is one good reason to include the full name of the author, site of publication, and title of work along with the link. Were the URL to change, your students won't be lost in the meantime because they can just look for it themselves.

It is especially important here to reiterate what you probably already know: linking to online content that is itself in violation of copyright is, potentially, unethical and illegal. Don't do it. If you find an HTML transcript of the book that you want your students to read, don't use it unless you can verify that the material is reproduced within the bounds of copyright law.

Public Domain Works

Goods: Countless free resources, and completely unrestricted: what's not to like? Just don't go photocopying your copy of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, though. The text of that work may be in the public domain, but the formatting and overall presentation of the work in your Penguin Classics edition (and especially the content of footnotes or endnotes) are the intellectual property of someone else. Locate the basic full text somewhere and let your students have that. Or transcribe the original yourself, if you want it that badly.

Bads: It's probably safe to say that much of what we, as instructors of comp/rhet or literature, want our students to read is protected by copyright. The most current, relevant articles are available (usually) online, so we can link to those. But what about that book that was just published that so meaningfully examines our roles as participants in social networking sites? Nobody wrote about that before 1923, except maybe Dostoevsky. (He wrote about everything, right?) Well, if there is absolutely nothing in the public domain (or linkable) that you can incorporate into your OER, then there are still at least two options left.

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Alternative Option One: Get Permission

One can always ask, right? In fact, as we'll see soon, asking can do wonders. It can also cause headaches, depending on what you want to do. Again, we'll talk about that soon, like, very soon.

Alternative Option Two: Build Your OER around Concepts and Methods that Don't Require Additional Content

This idea is fleshed out in the next module, but know here that we need not be restricted to some fatalistic "all or nothing" mindset. It's relatively easy to build your OER (or adapt your current materials to OER standards) without requiring external texts, as we will see in a bit.

Let's proceed by actually locating a public domain text that you can use.