question about copyright

Apostolis
Apostolis Posts: 3 researcher rank
in First-time course creation

Hey everyone,

My name is Apostolis and I am preparing my first course on Udemy about the C programming language. I would like to ask you a question about it and I would be very thankful if you can give me some useful advice.

I had created my material but I am wondering about the licenses of the programs (C language, GCC compiler etc) that I will use on my course. All these programs are open source and are copyrighted with some licences (GPL, MIT etc).


Can you give me please some advice about how to get permission (if needed) to use them in my course and how to attribute them?

Yours sincerely

Apostolos Dimosthenis

Comments

  • FrankKane
    FrankKane Posts: 1,881 rolemodel rank

    Generally speaking open-source tools like that are free for anyone to use; you'd only be concerned with licensing if you were somehow modifying or redistributing them. Assuming you are simply directing students to download them from some public repository there shouldn't be an issue in using them within your course.

    I am not a lawyer however. It would be a good idea to actually read those licenses and if you see anything concerning, to ask a lawyer.

  • Apostolis
    Apostolis Posts: 3 researcher rank

    Dear Frank,


    Thank you very much for your answer !!!

    Your advice really helps me a lot.

    The course I am preparing is a tutorial on the C language. Neither I modify a tool nor redistribute them.

    It is also a good idea to read the licenses.

    Also, I would like to congratulate you for your great courses !!!

  • Apostolis
    Apostolis Posts: 3 researcher rank

    Frank, I would like to ask you a similar question.

    The Ascii table is an iso. What does it mean? It is copyrighted? How to use the Ascii table in my course?

    Best Regards

  • FrankKane
    FrankKane Posts: 1,881 rolemodel rank

    I was about to write "of course you can include an ASCII table, it's just a standard"... but then I went to the ISO website to check their copyright policy, and it says:

    "All content on ISO Online is copyright protected. The copyright is owned by ISO. Any use of the content, including copying of it in whole or in part, for example to another Internet site, is prohibited and would require written permission from ISO."

    But, it's not clear to me who actually owns the ASCII standard. Is it ISO? ANSI? I can't seem to figure out who, if anyone, holds rights to it. And, is ISO claiming rights to the standard itself, or just to their PDF documents describing them? These are all questions for a real lawyer who specializes in intellectual property, which I am most definitely not.

    The Wikipedia page for ASCII includes complete tables, so to be safe you could just link students off to it rather than copying the table into your course. Or to any of the other gajillion ASCII tables on the Internet.

    (In my opinion, it's extremely unlikely you would actually run into legal trouble by including ASCII codes in a course... but you never know.)

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