Content on the Internet, such as images, text and music files, is usually protected by copyright. You may not distribute this content without express permission. In the worst case, this could lead to legal action or similar.
This help page is intended to protect you from such unpleasant surprises and to shed light on this legal topic.
Table of contents
Copyright
Copyright regulates the right to protect intellectual property, i.e. it defines the rights of authors and exploiters.
Intellectual property is understood to be the right to creations of the human mind (i.e. works in the form of pictures, musical works, books, for example).
The author is the creator of the work. The exploiter, on the other hand, continues to use the work created by the author.
For the most part, this help page only describes German copyright law. If works by authors of other countries are used, the legal situation of the respective country may have to be taken into account.
Licences
The author of a work initially owns the exclusive rights to the further use of the work. With a licence, he or she can arrange for a transfer of these rights. The exact conditions for the use of the work are then specified in the licence.
Legally, a licence is a contract that the author concludes with the licensee. In theory, he would have to negotiate the terms separately with each individual licensee.
With a free licence, the author can grant the general public - i.e. anyone - permission to use his or her work. The conditions of use can be structured differently and are therefore regulated in different forms of free licences.
Which licences can I use on Serlo and which not?
External content may be integrated on serlo.org with the following licences:
allowed | not allowed | |
|---|---|---|
Without copyright protection | public domain | |
Creative Commons Licences | CC0 , CC BY , CC BY-SA | CC BY-NC , CC BY-NC-SA , CC BY-ND , CC BY-NC-ND |
Other Licences | Pixabay Licence and similar ones | Just about everything else for which you do not have explicit permission. |
Exceptions: Note that copyright law also provides legal freedoms for the use of copyrighted works, allowing, for example, the quotation of extracts from a work.
What do the licences mean
Without copyright protection
With works that are in the public domain, have a public domain designation or a CC0 licence, you have no restrictions on their use. You do not have to name the author, you can change the work and also use it commercially, for example.
Creative Commons Licences
A Creative Commons Licence (with the exception of CC0) is made up of various elements.
What do the individual elements mean?
BY The author must be named.
SA If the content is edited, the work must be placed under the same licence.
ND The work must not be changed.
NC The content may not be used for commercial purposes.
On serlo.org you publish your content under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0. This licence states that the content may be shared and modified. However, the author must be named and, if the work is modified, the content must be distributed under the same licence. You can find the exact licence text here: CC BY-SA 4.0
Other Licences
In addition to the licences mentioned so far, there are a lot of other licences that do not correspond to any of the "standards" mentioned above. Enumerating the list of all such non-standard licences would go beyond the scope of this help page. Therefore, if you are not sure whether you are allowed to use a content, just ask in the comments on serlo.org or in our community chat in the channel #questions-and-requests.
Legal freedoms for the use of copyrighted works
Copyright law also regulates freedoms of the general public that an author cannot restrict. These freedoms allow the use of copyrighted works - without licensing agreements. A few important regulations for serlo.org:
