5. Licenses II
The
Open Content License (confusingly shortened to OPL), covers any copyrightable material that is digitally available. It allows free use and modification of content, but preserves copyright ownership with the creator. Derivations may be redistributed, but the nature of the changes must be stated: “You must cause the modified content to carry prominent notices stating that you changed it, the exact nature and content of the changes, and the date of any change. ”
[8] How one would satisfy this requirement for non-text content, such as images, audio and video, is not obvious or easy.
The
Open Publication License was created in response to the Open Content License, when traditional book publishers found problems with the license.
[9] The Open Publication License is written explicitly for text documents, and it contains two interesting restrictions that the creator may optionally choose to add. The first restriction bans substantial modifications without permission from the author. The second optional restriction forbids print republication without explicit permission. This is to support authors who want to distribute electronic copies of their work freely, but want to maintain exclusive print rights to their work.
The
Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence Lessig, offers a flexible range of licensing documents for creative content. To obtain a license, one simply identifies desired licensing terms via a web form, and the appropriate license is automatically determined based on these results. The main four license terms are:
Attribution: the creator must be given credit when their work is reused.
Noncommercial: the work may only be used for noncommercial purposes.
No derivative works: only verbatim copies are allowed; modifications may not be republished.
Share alike: all derivations of the work must be released under the same license as the source.
The Creative Commons licenses have gained considerable popularity among amateur writers and artists; the creative commons “some rights reserved” icon can be seen on many weblogs.
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