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/Blog/May I license a Power Point presentation I have created with Creative Commons licenses?

May I license a Power Point presentation I have created with Creative Commons licenses?

Image by Sarah Brockmann, released under CC 0 (1.0)

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You have cre­ated a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion and are now won­der­ing whether you can license it under a Cre­ative Com­mons license and what applies to pic­tograms, images, shapes, ani­ma­tions and other ele­ments of the pro­gram? Read this arti­cle to find out what Microsoft’s copy­right law says about this.

A Power Point pre­sen­ta­tion can be openly licensed if you own the copy­rights to all con­tent of the pre­sen­ta­tion or have obtained the rights to dis­trib­ute and openly license all mate­ri­als used (e.g. images, text, graph­ics).

How­ever, Microsoft assets (e.g. images, icons, pic­tograms, shapes, ani­ma­tions, smart art) that are included in Pow­er­Point must be excluded from the open license.

The rea­son for this is that Microsoft’s terms of use only per­mit the use of this cre­ative con­tent (such as icons, images, graph­ics) within Microsoft 365 appli­ca­tions and in the files exported from them (e.g. Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions, PDF export) for shar­ing or pub­li­ca­tion.

An open license (e.g. Cre­ative Com­mons) refers to the entire work and would also allow third par­ties to reuse the Microsoft assets it con­tains as they wish. How­ever, this is not per­mit­ted because Microsoft expressly pro­hibits this fur­ther use out­side the Microsoft envi­ron­ment and out­side the orig­i­nal file:

“Use of pro­gram ele­ments such as images, icons, ani­ma­tion ele­ments etc. out­side the pro­gram is gen­er­ally not per­mit­ted. Please refer to the respec­tive terms of use and license con­di­tions for your soft­ware.”

You may there­fore openly license the pre­sen­ta­tion as a whole, but you must make it clear that all Microsoft-owned con­tent (e.g. sym­bols, images, design ele­ments from Pow­er­Point) is not cov­ered by the open license and may not be used sep­a­rately:

“The pre­sen­ta­tion is licensed under the [selected open license, e.g. CC BY 4.0], except for all images, icons and design ele­ments con­tained in Microsoft Pow­er­Point. Microsoft’s terms of use apply to these.”

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