Usage Rights for Open Licensing – Update 2026

Licens­ing under an open license means grant­ing oth­ers exten­sive rights of use. For this to be legally valid, you or your uni­ver­sity must already hold the rel­e­vant rights. Since the ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion of the twillo blog post on usage rights, prac­ti­cal questions—particularly those related to col­lab­o­ra­tions, the increas­ing use of soft­ware, and the appli­ca­tion of AI—have mul­ti­plied sig­nif­i­cantly.

A Brief Recap: What the First Post Already Made Clear

Copy­right law grants an exclu­sive right sub­ject to per­mis­sion. This means that any use beyond purely pri­vate use requires either per­mis­sion from the rights hold­ers or a statu­tory excep­tion. Such per­mis­sion to use a work may arise from the pub­lic domain, from copy­right exceptions—such as the right to quote—or from con­trac­tu­ally granted rights of use.

Any­one who incor­po­rates third-party works into openly licensed mate­r­ial must have usage rights that per­mit such co-licens­ing in the first place. Oth­er­wise, the third-party mate­r­ial must be explic­itly excluded from the open license. With­out such a des­ig­na­tion, the impres­sion may arise that the third-party work is also cov­ered by the selected CC license, even though there is no legal basis for this.

Cross-licens­ing there­fore requires that the nec­es­sary rights actu­ally exist. In prac­tice, sim­ple rights of use are often insuf­fi­cient. As a rule, either exclu­sive rights of use or very broad non-exclu­sive rights of use are required—rights that are granted with­out any tem­po­ral or geo­graph­i­cal restric­tions, are irrev­o­ca­ble, cover all known and unknown types of use, and also include the right to sub­li­cense.

A prac­ti­cal solu­tion is there­fore often to use the third-party work while explic­itly exclud­ing it from the open license, for exam­ple with a note such as:

““This mate­r­ial is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Excluded from this license is the work by XY (title, source …).”

Alter­na­tively, the copy­right hold­ers can license the work them­selves under an open license, allow­ing you to use it directly under that license.

Typical Problem Areas in 2026

In higher edu­ca­tion, sit­u­a­tions are increas­ingly aris­ing in which usage rights are not clearly defined.

Collaborative Works and External Contributors

Mate­ri­als pro­duced as part of col­lab­o­ra­tive projects may only be licensed under an open license once all co-authors have con­sented to the open licens­ing. This is pro­vided for in Sec­tion 8 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG). Co-author­ship requires that the respec­tive con­tri­bu­tions rep­re­sent an inde­pen­dent cre­ative achieve­ment.

If mate­ri­als are cre­ated in col­lab­o­ra­tion with stu­dents, the uni­ver­sity or the instruc­tor does not auto­mat­i­cally hold the rights to use the stu­dents’ con­tri­bu­tions. Rather, these rights must be granted by con­tract, for exam­ple through a license agree­ment. twillo pro­vides appro­pri­ate tem­plates for this pur­pose: https://www.twillo.de/vorlagen-und-werkzeuge/ The same applies to the par­tic­i­pa­tion of exter­nal instruc­tors: Here, too, it must be ver­i­fied whether the uni­ver­sity holds suf­fi­cient usage rights for open licens­ing.

Educational materials with publisher-provided content

Con­tent from com­mer­cial publishers—such as illus­tra­tions from textbooks—may gen­er­ally not be used with­out the publisher’s con­sent if it is not avail­able under an open license. For older con­tent that may be in the pub­lic domain, it is also nec­es­sary to ver­ify whether the orig­i­nal work is actu­ally avail­able or whether it is a later adap­ta­tion, which may still be pro­tected by copy­right.

Per­mis­sion to use OER can often be obtained infor­mally by email­ing the pub­lisher. In this case, the spe­cific pur­pose of use—that is, pub­li­ca­tion as OER—as well as the intended license should be clearly stated. Expe­ri­ence shows that pub­lish­ers often agree as long as it is made clear that the con­tent in ques­tion will not be reli­censed and that both the pub­lisher and the source are prop­erly cited.

Templates, Icon Collections, and Stock Elements

While many pre­sen­ta­tion tem­plates, icons, and illus­tra­tions from online col­lec­tions are gen­er­ally free to use, they do not allow sub­li­cens­ing under Cre­ative Com­mons licenses. They are there­fore often only of lim­ited use for true OERs under CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA. Alter­na­tives suit­able for OERs are resources that have them­selves been clearly pub­lished under a Cre­ative Com­mons license or are in the pub­lic domain, and whose ori­gin and license are doc­u­mented.

If tem­plates or other stock ele­ments are used in OER, it should be explic­itly stated that these com­po­nents are not included in the license and remain sub­ject to the license terms of the respec­tive provider. It is rec­om­mended to include a direct link to the respec­tive license terms.

AI-generated content and tool-specific assets

The 2026 twillo sur­vey shows that AI tools are already being used exten­sively in OER cre­ation, but often with­out suf­fi­cient con­sid­er­a­tion of rights and licens­ing issues. Here, a dis­tinc­tion must be made between two lev­els: on the one hand, the copy­right to the con­tent pro­duced, and on the other, the con­trac­tual terms of the soft­ware used.

AI-gen­er­ated con­tent may be in the pub­lic domain under copy­right law if it lacks a suf­fi­cient level of human cre­ativ­ity. Nev­er­the­less, it may be sub­ject to con­trac­tual restric­tions set forth in the provider’s terms of use, such as lim­i­ta­tions on com­mer­cial use or sub­li­cens­ing.

Assets spe­cific to a program—such as stock images, icons, or tem­plates within an (AI) tool—are often licensed only for inter­nal use or spe­cific pur­poses and are not intended for open sub­li­cens­ing as OER. In prac­tice, this means that the license terms of the AI tool and the assets used must be care­fully reviewed. The key con­sid­er­a­tion is always whether the output—including open, even com­mer­cial, reuse—may be shared.

As soon as third-party assets are used, the same fun­da­men­tal ques­tion arises as with tra­di­tional third-party mate­ri­als: Are there actu­ally suf­fi­cient usage rights for co-licens­ing, or must the mate­r­ial be explic­itly excluded from the open license?

Review of Usage Rights for OER

1. Who is the author?
   First, it must be deter­mined who actu­ally con­tributed to the cre­ative process. In addi­tion to uni­ver­sity fac­ulty and staff, this may also include stu­dents, exter­nal instruc­tors, or ser­vice providers.
   
2. What rights are involved?
   Next, it must be deter­mined whether pub­lish­ing con­tracts, project con­tracts, or other agree­ments already include a suf­fi­cient trans­fer of rights. Is there an explicit grant of rights of use or per­mis­sion to use the con­tent, for exam­ple, based on a twillo tem­plate?
   
3. Does the mate­r­ial include works by other authors?
   The next step is to iden­tify all third-party com­po­nents indi­vid­u­ally, such as images, graph­ics, audio, video, and text excerpts, tem­plates, icons, or (AI-gen­er­ated) assets. The source and terms of use must be checked sep­a­rately for each ele­ment. If there is an open license, doc­u­mented per­mis­sion, or a rel­e­vant excep­tion, such as the right to quote, use may be per­mit­ted under cer­tain cir­cum­stances. How­ever, quo­ta­tions must always be excluded from the open license.
   
4. Are the rights suf­fi­cient for co-licens­ing?
   Sub­li­cens­ing is only an option if the rights of use are unlim­ited in time and scope, irrev­o­ca­ble, and sub­li­cens­able, or if the work itself is already licensed under an open license. Oth­er­wise, the third-party mate­r­ial must be expressly excluded from the OER license.
   
5. Doc­u­ment Every­thing
   Finally, all per­mits, con­tracts, and source ref­er­ences should be care­fully doc­u­mented and securely filed. This is the only way to pro­vide reli­able answers to any future inquiries.

Those who con­sis­tently fol­low this approach will cre­ate a solid foun­da­tion for open licens­ing and sig­nif­i­cantly reduce legal uncer­tain­ties.