The continuous advance of technology in our society has given way to an emerging digital ecosystem, in which new ways of carrying out activities that a short time ago seemed unattainable are developed. This environment has significantly influenced industry and academia, providing digital tools that are essential to optimize the functions and processes of each sector, such as education.
Education is a fundamental pillar that encourages the development of different societies and the use of digital tools has allowed access to learning material, as well as the distribution and creation of new materials, to present new challenges related to Intellectual Property. specifically to the “Copyright” that falls on educational material.
As previously indicated, copyright is a set of rights that are granted to creators and owners of works, so that they can exercise control over the use, distribution, communication to the public and reproduction of their works. , they can even decide to be recognized as authors. This protection applies to various educational materials such as academic articles, textbooks, audiovisual works, music, theatrical works, educational platforms and even online resources.
This technological evolution, through its new tools, facilitates access to innovative information channels and allows the optimization of resources for learning. This also raises a question regarding access to education, because the costs of educational materials, Texts, online resources and other works may be restricted for many students and educational centers, especially in developing countries, such as Ecuador.
In response to these problems, Creative Commons licenses have been created as solutions, whose objective is to allow authors to share certain works, under certain conditions, allowing low-cost or free access to the educational materials that currently belong to them. Models of open science, open education and even free access educational resources have also emerged whose objective is to promote the creation of educational materials as well as their free use.
Although the use of digital tools has increased in recent years, it should be emphasized that the pandemic accelerated their use in education, which is why access to massive, open online courses is common. MOOCs. In this sense, there is a current that allows copyright licenses to grant a limited and flexible use of resources, either allowing modifications to be made to works to create personalized content, authorizing the distribution of material through any digital platform. , allows the adaptation of multimedia materials always recognizing the authorship, as well as the recognition of their contribution to education.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that the recognition of the copyright of educational material guarantees the recognition of the creators, allowing that, with the open license model, the authors can freely share their creations, promoting access to education and allowing that this can be equitable for everyone.
Kelvis Zambrano López and Paola González Acurio
Intellectual Property Specialists
Links of interest about education and open science:
