4. Licenses I
In Canada, the United States, and most other countries, creative works are copyrighed by default; it is not necessary to include a copyright notice to receive copyright protection. As such, for a work to be designated as open content, the creator must actively specify which economic and moral rights they are forfeiting. This can be accomplished by appending self-composed anti-copyright notice, or by naming the preexisting open content license it is released under.
A casual anti-copyright notice may simply read:
This document is published as Open Content. You are free to copy, modify, and reuse the contents of this document, but please give the author (Wendy Huot) credit whenever you do so.
Such open content notices do not carry enforcible legal meaning, so it is advisable to use a full open content license when one wants to request proper attribution or stipulate a share-alike restriction. A variety of open content licenses are available for free online.
[5]
The first open content licenses emerged from the need for quality licensing of open source documentation. Before a dedicated open content license was created, documentation was sometimes released under software licenses. The
GNU General Public License (GPL) is perhaps the best known open source license; it is released by the Free Software Foundation and was used extensively in the creation of Linux. It stipulates that copyright notices cannot be removed from software, and authorship cannot be removed. It is also a share-alike, copyleft license: derivatives using GPL'd material must also be released under the GPL license. The Free Software Foundation states that non-software content may be released under the GPL
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; such content would be considered open content and copylefted.
In 1998 the Free Software Foundation released an open content (though they may prefer to call it “free content”) equivalent to the GPL, called the
GNU Free Document license (GFDL). The GFDL was intended for software documentation (such as books, articles, and text), but documents on any subject can be licensed under the GFDL. As there is no concept of “source code” and “executable file” for written text, the GFDL defines a parallel concept: transparent and opaque documents.
[7] A transparent document is one that is readable with a generic text editor; the category includes plain ASCII, simple HTML, LaTeX files, and XML (when the DTD is available). An opaque document is one that cannot easily be edited freely; it includes proprietary file types such as PDF. A transparent document is thought of as source code; a GFDL'd document must make a transparent version available, and so do any derivations.
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