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<title>Open Licensing #ioe12 | eRambler</title>
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<div class="h1"><a href="../../">eRambler</a></div>
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<div class="lead">Jez Cope's blog on becoming a research technologist</div>
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<p class="archive-warning"><strong><em>Please note:</em></strong> this older content has been <strong>archived</strong> and is no longer fully linked into the site. Please go to the <a href="../../">current home page</a> for up-to-date content.</p>
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<h1 class="post-title p-name">Open Licensing #ioe12</h1>
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<a class="u-url" href="http://erambler.co.uk/blog/open-licensing/">Sunday 15 January 2012</a>
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Tagged with
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<ul class="post-tags">
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Copyright</span></li>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Licensing</span></li>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Creative Commons</span></li>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">IOE12</span></li>
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<li class="p-category"><span class="tag">Openness</span></li>
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</ul>
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<p><a id="post-image" class="alignright" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biwook/145765624/" title="A copyright will protect you from PIRATES by Ioan Sameli, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/54/145765624_65d3eaf886_m.jpg" width="191" height="240" alt="A copyright will protect you from PIRATES"></a><br>
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<em>This blog post is part of my contribution to the open online course<br>
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<a href="http://openeducation.us/">Introduction to Openness in Education</a>.</em></p>
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<h2 id="copyright">Copyright</h2>
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<p>At the heart of the various forms of “open” lies the concept of intellectual<br>
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property: who owns it, who can use it and for what.</p>
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<p>A physical object, such as the computer I’m writing this blog post on, is in<br>
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one place at a time, and its ownership is pretty clear cut: I paid for it and<br>
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it’s in my house, and if you took it without my permission we’d call that<br>
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theft.</p>
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<p>Things get trickier when you start talking about creative works. If I write a<br>
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piece of music and you make a copy, I still have the piece of music, but so do<br>
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you. I can take a photograph of a painting by Degas, and it stays hanging in<br>
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the gallery, but in some sense I have a copy that I can enjoy independently of<br>
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the original work.</p>
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<p>If this situation goes unchecked, then there’s not a lot of incentive to become<br>
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an artist, or a composer, or a writer. Even if you charge for your work there’s<br>
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nothing to stop me buying one copy and then selling hundreds, for which you<br>
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would see no profit whatsoever.</p>
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<p>Under most modern legal systems, the concept of copyright exists to right this<br>
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imbalance. It does this by allowing the creator of a work the opportunity to<br>
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exploit that work in whatever way they see fit, effectively creating a<br>
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monopoly.</p>
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<p>As the creator of a work, it’s still possible to grant certain rights to third<br>
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parties, and this is done by the granting of licenses. This is the mechanism<br>
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which allows you to “sell” rights to a work in exchange for money or some other<br>
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consideration.</p>
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<h2 id="fair-usefair-dealing">Fair use/fair dealing</h2>
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<p>If you were to film an interview in the high street of your town, you might<br>
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think that it would be difficult to infringe copyright in any way. If you’re<br>
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not infringing copyright, you don’t need to pay anyone for a license. Yet if,<br>
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say, a TV set in the background was showing reruns of The Simpsons, then you<br>
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could well be in from a visit from lawyers representing the Fox Broadcasting<br>
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Company.</p>
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<p>Some jurisdictions include a concept of “fair use” (or fair dealing in the UK),<br>
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which permits such incidental reuses under a specific set of circumstances.<br>
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This can make documentary-making, for example, much easier.</p>
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<p>However, many organisations (Fox being a common example) are quite happy to<br>
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threaten legal action and demand that you pay tens or hundreds of thousands of<br>
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pounds(/dollars/euros/etc.) for a license, even if you may in fact be covered<br>
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by fair use rules. They are able to do this because most people are unaware of<br>
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their legal rights, or even if they are do not have the money to fight the<br>
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ensuing lawsuit.</p>
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<p>Even if the law gives you a fair use right to use some work or other, other<br>
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organisations to which you might sell your own work may not be so forgiving.<br>
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Because of the litigation culture surrounding copyright, a lot of organisations<br>
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take a very paranoid approach and insist on rights being cleared and licenses<br>
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purchased even if they’re not strictly necessary.</p>
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<h2 id="orphaned-works">Orphaned works</h2>
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<p>The situation becomes worse when the holder of the rights that must be cleared<br>
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cannot be found. This usually happens when no contact details can be found for<br>
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the creator of a work, or when those that can be found are out of date. In many<br>
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cases, it’s impossible even to know whether the rights holder is still alive,<br>
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and works like this are referred to as “orphaned works”.</p>
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<p>In the early days of copyright this would not have been a problem: for<br>
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copyright to exist it was necessary to the creator to explicitly assert their<br>
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rights, and to renew them periodically.</p>
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<p>However it is now the case in the US and the UK that copyright automatically<br>
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exists for the lifetime of the creator and for 70 years after their death. If<br>
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the creator has passed away, their estate still owns the copyright, but may be<br>
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impossible to trace until they discover the breach.</p>
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<p>For this reason, it is almost impossible to safely use orphaned works — if<br>
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you do, you do so at your own risk.</p>
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<h2 id="open-licensing">Open licensing</h2>
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<p>As you can see, copyright creates incentives to create, but the way it’s<br>
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currently implemented can also have a chilling effect on certain types of<br>
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creation, especially those that involve mashing up existing content.</p>
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<p>There’s not a lot most of us can do about the depredations of Fox and their<br>
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ilk, other than lobbying our MPs for a change in the law. But thankfully we can<br>
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make it easier for others to make use of our own works.</p>
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<p>Open licensing gives creators legal tools to relinquish some or all of their<br>
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rights over a piece of work, in the interests of supporting the creativity of<br>
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others.</p>
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<p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> was set up to provide a set of<br>
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open licenses which creators can use to make it very easy to understand what<br>
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can and can’t be done with their work.</p>
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<p>The key terms which can be applied by the standard Creative Commons licenses<br>
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are:</p>
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<ul>
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<li>
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<strong>Attribution</strong>: the creator of the work must be acknowledged in any works<br>
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which incorporate it;</li>
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<li>
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<strong>Share-alike</strong>: the work can only be used if the resulting work is<br>
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released under the same license;</li>
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<li>
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<strong>Non-commercial</strong>: the work may only be used if the user doesn’t profit<br>
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financially from doing so;</li>
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<li>
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<strong>No derivatives</strong>: the work may only be redistributed unchanged from its<br>
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original form.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>By combining these terms, it is possible to specify exactly what rights you<br>
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want to retain on each individual work.</p>
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<p>In higher education, we often find ourselves needing a photo or video to<br>
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illustrate a point in a class or at a conference, or increasingly in a blog<br>
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post (like this one). Thanks to Creative Commons, finding content to be used<br>
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legally in this way is as easy as doing a <a href="http://search.creativecommons.org/">simple web<br>
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search</a> — no more excuses!</p>
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<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
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<p>This was intended to be a short blog post, and it’s already longer than I<br>
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intended! There are a whole raft of other important issues, such as the<br>
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creeping extension of copyright terms, which I haven’t had space to cover, but<br>
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hopefully I’ll come back to those some other time.</p>
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<p>For now, I hope you’ve got a good idea of why open licensing is necessary and<br>
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how you can apply it to your own creative works. It’s worth noting that this<br>
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whole blog is released under a CC license — just scroll to the bottom!</p>
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<p><em>In writing this post, I made heavy use of <a href="http://openeducation.us/open-licensing">this open licensing<br>
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material</a>, which I encourage you to<br>
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take a look at if you want to learn more.</em></p>
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<p><em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/biwook/145765624/">Ioan Sameli via<br>
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Flickr</a></em></p>
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