Skip to content
Instructional Design Knowledge Base
Instructional Design Knowledge Base
Share
Explore

icon picker
Copyright

IDs are expected to and are responsible for complying with copyright law and all laws governing intellectual property.

Intellectual Property Policy

The
Columbia College Intellectual Property Policy
⁠
is available.

Fair Use

The Columbia College Stafford Library provides a
Copyright and Fair Use LibGuide
⁠
including detailed information on fair use and compliance guidelines.
When linking to articles within the Stafford Library, always use permalinks as opposed to downloading the PDFs and saving them in the course.

Royalty-Free and Public Domain

Royalty-Free: material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights that may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use.
Public Domain: creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws.
Royalty-free (such as imagery from
Unsplash.com
⁠
) and public domain content (such as historical images from
Wikimedia Commons
⁠
) are safe to use for course design. When using royalty-free or public domain images, attribution is typically not required, however it is helpful to document the source using code comments for future redevelopments.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC): A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work."
Creative Commons assets may also be used for course design, however these typically require some sort of attribution or credit. You can search for CC images using the
Creative Commons website
⁠
. Be sure to link back to the source as indicated by the Creative Commons law associated with the asset.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.