You build a school-fundraiser website. You grab a photo from an image search, a chart from a news article, and a music loop from a popular artist — all "just found online."
Legally, you likely just violated three copyrights. "Publicly viewable" and "free to reuse" are entirely different properties. Every one of those works was owned the moment its creator made it — no registration, no © symbol required — and viewable did not mean licensed to you.
Now the good news: an enormous, deliberately shared commons exists — Creative Commons media, open-source code, public-domain archives — built precisely so you can reuse legally. The skill (worth real exam points and required by your Create PT) is telling the two worlds apart and giving credit correctly in both.
Intellectual property (IP) is a work or invention that results from creativity, to which its creator has rights. Copyright is the legal protection covering creative works — including code, images, music, videos, and text — and it applies automatically upon creation in most jurisdictions. Default state of anything you find online: owned, all rights reserved.
The CED's operating rules:
From most restricted to least:
| Tier | What it means | Reuse rules |
|---|---|---|
| All rights reserved (default copyright) | Creator keeps every right | Permission required for use |
| Creative Commons (CC) | Creator pre-grants specific permissions via a public license | Follow the license's terms — variants require attribution (BY), or forbid commercial use (NC), or forbid modifications (ND), or require sharing derivatives alike (SA) |
| Open source | Software whose source code is made freely available to use, study, modify, and redistribute (under its license's terms) | Use/modify/share per the license; attribution and share-alike terms vary |
| Public domain | No exclusive IP rights (expired, waived, or never applicable) | Free use by anyone — attribution still ethically expected |
Creative Commons is the exam's favorite: a creator who wants their photo reused without individual permission requests attaches a CC license announcing the pre-granted terms. Know the four letter-codes conceptually (BY = credit me; NC = no commercial use; ND = no derivatives; SA = derivatives must carry the same license) — the exam describes them in words and asks which scenario complies.
Open source extends the idea to software: source code you may use and modify. CED-level claims: open source accelerates innovation (developers build on shared work instead of reinventing), enables collaboration and code review at scale, and powers much of the modern Internet. Distinguish from freeware (free to use, but source closed) — free-of-charge ≠ open.
Open access applies the spirit to research: scholarly publications made freely available online rather than locked behind subscription paywalls, so findings spread faster and to everyone (researchers, students, the public — the divide lesson echoes here).
Two realities the CED wants acknowledged, both sides:
Problem: A student finds a striking photo on a blog with no license statement, no © symbol, no terms. May the student use it on a commercial site?
Solution: No. Absence of a notice changes nothing — copyright attaches automatically at creation, and the default is all rights reserved. The student needs the photographer's permission or must find comparably licensed (CC/public-domain) imagery instead.
Interpretation: The exam plants "there was no copyright symbol, so it's free" as a distractor. Symbols are optional; ownership isn't.
Problem: A musician wants her song freely shareable and remixable by hobbyists, with credit, but doesn't want companies selling ads with it. Which licensing approach fits?
Solution: A Creative Commons license with attribution (BY) and non-commercial (NC) terms — pre-granting exactly the uses she welcomes (share, remix, with credit) while withholding the one she doesn't (commercial use). All-rights-reserved would block the hobbyists; public domain would allow the ad companies.
Interpretation: License questions are requirements-matching: list what the creator wants to allow/forbid, then find the tier (and terms) drawing that exact line.
Problem: Program A costs $0 to download; its code is secret. Program B's full source code is published under a license permitting use, modification, and redistribution. Which is open source, and what can a developer legally do with it that they can't with the other?
Solution: B is open source; A is merely freeware (free of charge, closed source). With B, a developer can study the implementation, modify it (fix bugs, add features), and redistribute the result per the license. With A they can only run it as-is — price was never the distinction; source access and modification rights are.
Interpretation: "Free" is the trap word. Open source is about rights to the code, not the price tag.
Problem: For a class project, a student's program includes a sorting procedure adapted from an open-source library (license permits reuse with attribution) plus images from a public-domain archive. Which action is required for full academic and legal compliance?
(A) Nothing — both sources permit use (B) Cite the open-source library per its license, and attribute the image archive as academic honesty requires — permission-to-use never waives credit (C) Remove the library code, since programs may not include any outside work (D) Pay both sources a licensing fee
Solution: (B). Legal permission (license/public domain) governs use; attribution obligations come from the license's terms (BY-style) and from academic integrity, which demands crediting all non-original work regardless. (A) conflates "may use" with "may present as mine"; (C) overcorrects; (D) invents fees the licenses waived.
Interpretation: Use ≠ authorship. The compliant pattern is always: permitted use + clear credit. Hold that thought for two paragraphs — the Create PT enforces it with scores.
1. (C). Automatic at creation — the single most-tested fact in this topic. (A)/(B) describe optional extras.
2. (B). Pre-granted, publicly announced permissions — CC's entire purpose. (A) confuses CC with abandoning rights; the creator keeps everything not granted.
3. (B). Free classroom use + credit satisfies both BY (attribution) and NC (non-commercial). (A) violates both terms; (C) violates NC; (D) confuses CC with public domain — a listed distractor because it's a real student misconception.
4. (C). Source access + modify/redistribute rights, via license. (A) is the freeware trap.
5. (B). Build-on-shared-work = faster innovation — the CED's claim. (A)/(D) are guarantees no license provides.
6. (D). Open access = research literature, paywall-free. The other choices are everyday uses of the word "open."
7. (C). Copying: legal (no rights exist to infringe). Claiming authorship: plagiarism, an ethics violation independent of law. This exact legal/ethical split is the question's point — and (B) is wrong precisely because public domain has no copyright to infringe.
8. (C). Mass redistribution of a purchased copy is the canonical infringement. (A) is a classic limited exception (brief credited quote, commentary); (B) is licensed use; (D) is private use.
9. (A) and (B). Both sides of the enforcement trade-off, per the CED. (C) is flatly false; (D) overclaims what watermarks do (they aid detection, not prevention).
10. (C). Attribution + share-alike open source = community improvement with credit and license continuity. (A)/(D) block the community; (B) blocks modification.
11. (A). Brief excerpt + educational critique = the classic limited-exception profile (purpose, amount, and context all favor it). (B), (C), (D) are wholesale commercial uses no exception covers.
12. (Model answer.) (i) The tutorial snippet: include it only with an in-code comment citing the source (site/page/author), and ensure my required student-developed procedure is not built from it — the PT requires original authorship of the graded algorithm, and unattributed code (even permitted-to-use code) is plagiarism under academic-integrity rules. (ii) The CC-BY icons: use them with the attribution the BY term requires (credit the creator/collection, e.g., in the program's credits or documentation). Both requirements exist because permission to use never includes permission to present as one's own work — the license solves the legal question; attribution solves the honesty one.
Answer letter distribution check: C, B, B, C, B, D, C, C, A+B, C, A — singles: A×1, B×3, C×5, D×1 + multi (A,B). Cumulative through L22 ≈ A 22%, B 31%, C 27%, D 20%.
12 (short response, Create-PT rehearsal). Your Create PT program uses (i) a code snippet from a tutorial website, and (ii) two icons from a CC-BY image collection. State exactly what you must do for each to submit the PT with integrity, and why the requirements exist even though both sources allow reuse.
This lesson is directly load-bearing for your PT score — the Create PT has explicit academic-integrity rules:
The one-sentence policy that keeps you safe: anything you didn't create gets a visible credit, and the required procedure and algorithm are yours alone. That's this lesson's whole ladder applied to a single artifact you'll actually submit.
1. (C). Automatic at creation — the single most-tested fact in this topic. (A)/(B) describe optional extras.
2. (B). Pre-granted, publicly announced permissions — CC's entire purpose. (A) confuses CC with abandoning rights; the creator keeps everything not granted.
3. (B). Free classroom use + credit satisfies both BY (attribution) and NC (non-commercial). (A) violates both terms; (C) violates NC; (D) confuses CC with public domain — a listed distractor because it's a real student misconception.
4. (C). Source access + modify/redistribute rights, via license. (A) is the freeware trap.
5. (B). Build-on-shared-work = faster innovation — the CED's claim. (A)/(D) are guarantees no license provides.
6. (D). Open access = research literature, paywall-free. The other choices are everyday uses of the word "open."
7. (C). Copying: legal (no rights exist to infringe). Claiming authorship: plagiarism, an ethics violation independent of law. This exact legal/ethical split is the question's point — and (B) is wrong precisely because public domain has no copyright to infringe.
8. (C). Mass redistribution of a purchased copy is the canonical infringement. (A) is a classic limited exception (brief credited quote, commentary); (B) is licensed use; (D) is private use.
9. (A) and (B). Both sides of the enforcement trade-off, per the CED. (C) is flatly false; (D) overclaims what watermarks do (they aid detection, not prevention).
10. (C). Attribution + share-alike open source = community improvement with credit and license continuity. (A)/(D) block the community; (B) blocks modification.
11. (A). Brief excerpt + educational critique = the classic limited-exception profile (purpose, amount, and context all favor it). (B), (C), (D) are wholesale commercial uses no exception covers.
12. (Model answer.) (i) The tutorial snippet: include it only with an in-code comment citing the source (site/page/author), and ensure my required student-developed procedure is not built from it — the PT requires original authorship of the graded algorithm, and unattributed code (even permitted-to-use code) is plagiarism under academic-integrity rules. (ii) The CC-BY icons: use them with the attribution the BY term requires (credit the creator/collection, e.g., in the program's credits or documentation). Both requirements exist because permission to use never includes permission to present as one's own work — the license solves the legal question; attribution solves the honesty one.
Answer letter distribution check: C, B, B, C, B, D, C, C, A+B, C, A — singles: A×1, B×3, C×5, D×1 + multi (A,B). Cumulative through L22 ≈ A 22%, B 31%, C 27%, D 20%.
Exam tip: License questions reduce to two sorted lists: what the creator wants to ALLOW and what they want to FORBID. Write both (three words each), then walk the ladder — all-rights-reserved, CC (with which letter-terms?), open source, public domain — and stop at the first tier drawing exactly that line. The distractors are always adjacent rungs of the ladder.