8  Licenses and IP law

If you create something, by default it is copyrighted. That means that you own the intellectual property rights to it. This is true even if you created it in time you were employed with public money; and even if you endorse Open Science principles and so want to share the materials you create.

This copyight describes what others are allowed to do with your intellectual property unless or until you specify otherwise. What others are allowed to do pretty much boils down to: nothing. They are not allowed to copy your work, or sell it, or distribute it, or modify it.

Of course, this is the antithesis of Open Science principles, which mandate pretty much the opposite. Fortunately, being the intellectual owner of your works means you can override the default “rights” laid out in copyright.

You do this by attaching a license. Copyright itself can also be seen as a license, but one that disallows everything. To make it easy to specify what you want allow people to do with your work, the Creative Commons non-profit organization created a number of licenses (“CC licenses”). One of these is a different name for something that already existed: the public domain.

8.1 Public domain or CC0

The opposite of copyright is depositing a work in the public domain (also known as “CC0” or “Creative Commons Zero”). If you do this, you void all rights, allowing everybody to treat the work as if it were their own. This is the more liberal license: it prohibits nothing and allows everything.

8.2 The CC palette

In addition, you can choose a combination of rights from what you could call the CC palette. First, you can allow or disallow commercial use of your work. Second, you can allow or disallow modifications of your work. If you disallow modifications, others are only allows to copy or distribute your work unaltered. Third, if you allow modifications, you can implement a ‘pay it forward’ model where others who use your work must license the resulting work under the same license.

After applying a CC license, you’re still allowed to given individuals or organizations extra rights. For example, if you apply a CC-NC license (“Non Commercial”), you can still choose to give an individual or organization rights to sell your work.

To look at all Creative Commons licenses, see https://creativecommons.org.

8.3 Data licenses

For data, a specific set of licenses has been created, that are similarly easy to understand and apply as the Creative Commons licenses. These were created by Open Data Commons (see the pattern here?), and you can view them at https://opendatacommons.org.

8.4 Software licenses

For software, licenses are considerably more complicated. There’s an overview of what you are and aren’t allows to do with the most popular ones at https://choosealicense.com/licenses, and there is a more extensive overview at https://opensource.org/licenses.

One license that’s a good default if you don’t want to delve into this is the Community Research and Academic Programming License (the CRAPL), developed by Matt Might. Its premise is simple:

If you’re an academic, the CRAPL is an excuse to convert ugly software into good karma.

Matt Might

You can learn more about the CRAPL at https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/.