JISC PoWR Handbook DRAFT September 2008
Open content licensing Intro to licensing You can think of copyright (and other IP rights) as a bundle of sticks. Each stick represents an individual aspect of copyright, like the right to create an adaptation, or the right to distribute a work. What at first glance could be a really broad right such as distribution can be thought of as a bundle of sticks all in themselves. You can break up the right to distribute only via the internet (and not at physical retail outlets). You could license the right to distribute in physical form (such as CDs) worldwide or you could break this right up geographically by jurisdiction, such as distribution rights in Europe but not North America or UK only. Licences are how these sticks get broken up and handed over to others. Industry practice in many areas has collected certain aspects of licensing together with terminology that you won't find in the actual text of copyright law. So for example, the music industry refers to "mechanical rights", which you won't find in the UK law on copyright (the Copyright Designs Patents Act). In terms of the actual law, "mechanical rights" licenses copying the music, issuing copies to the public, and renting or lending copies to the public. When discussing licensing, it is important to distinguish between a licence and an assignation: ● Licence - retaining ownership but granting rights to others to use it under certain circumstances. ● Assignation - transferring the entire ownership to another (handing over the whole bundle of sticks).
After assigning a work, you would no longer own the rights to the work. This means that you could infringe a work that you created if you use it without permission from the new rightsholder. Once an IP rights has been assigned, the original creator or owner has no rights over the assigned work, whereas if licensed then the original owner or creator can still retain certain rights.
Open content licensing Copyright, as you've seen, grants exclusive rights to the rightsholder so that, unless covered by a specific exception, users of the work must ask for permission. Because copyright lasts for quite a long time (life of the author plus 70 years in the UK for some works), you must generally assume that a work has copyright and thus often need to seek permission before using it. Always seeking permission and negotiating a licence (outlining the scope of the permission) can be a burdensome process, especially as even just tracking down who to ask permission from can be very difficult (and sometimes even impossible). Open content licensing generally grants a wide range of permission in copyright for use and re-use of the work via a copyright licence, whilst retaining a relatively small set of rights for the rightsholder. In contrast, to the "permission principle" built into copyright law, open content licensing reverses this default and grants permission for a very wide range of uses, but asks that users seek permission only in a limited number cases. This approach is often known as a "some rights reserved" model, in contrast to the familiar "all rights reserved" copyright notice asserting control by the owner of all copyright. Some important points about open content licensing to keep in mind: ● Open content licensing still depends on copyright to grant some (usually most) permissions but retain
some areas where permission would still be required;
● This style of licensing, like any other, can only be used on works by someone who owns the rights over
the work or otherwise has permission to do so.
Creative Commons One major example of open content licensing is that of Creative Commons (CC). This organisation, founded in 2001, maintains a number of easy to use licences available via their website. These licences allow for further distribution and copying of the work without further permission from the rightsholder. The main set of CC licences all offer a series of 'baseline rights' together with four 'licence elements' that can be mixed and matched to produce a licence through a point-and-click web interface: The baseline rights: ● ● ● ●
to copy the work to distribute the work to display or perform the work publicly to make digital public performances of the work (e.g., webcasting)
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