CC Licenses and Trademarks: A Guide for Organizational OER Creators and Distributors

This primer is a guide to understanding the relationship between your rights as a copyright owner using Creative Commons licenses (particularly CC BY) and your trademark rights within the context of open educational resources (?OER?). Many people in the OER community are under the mistaken impression that copyright is the only tool at their disposal to protect and control their work and that content alone is the only valuable commodity associated with OER production. Although Creative Commons (CC) believes that copyright should be the principal means used by authors to control their creative works, this primer explains another, secondary set of rights you may have to protect your work ? trademark rights ? while still allowing for the downstream adaptation, translation, and localization of your work that are so central to the goals of OER.