Legal functioning of open content licenses for OER

In the last section, we discussed the benefits of open content licensing, which applies equally to OER. Their overall goal is to improve the education of people. Educational material published under public licenses according to OER criteria can be customized and adapted to different needs. It can be translated into other languages, didactically modified, freely shared and constantly updated. Whoever creates or distributes OER materials is usually not a copyright specialist at the same time. Public licenses such as the CC licenses guarantee all these functions. Neither do contracts have to be concluded or paid for the use of the content. If the copyright holders only want to grant limited rights, they can reserve certain rights by selecting more restrictive licenses. However, restrictive licence variants should only be used if one is aware of the consequences and pursues a concrete goal (cf. Kreutzer/Hirche 2017: 36).

If a user violates the license obligations, the license expires automatically. If, for example, he or she does not name the author or does not point out the validity of the license, then the user loses his or her rights.

Notice:
The use of OER does not take place in a "legal vacuum". It is based on legally valid contracts, which, however, have the advantage that they are not concluded within the framework of an individual transaction (contract negotiation, conclusion of contract), instead they are concluded automatically. If the OER usage agreement in the form of the open content license is violated, the usual legal possibilities are opened up to take action against it.