Open license

“ This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This licence is often compared to open source software licences. All new works based on yours will carry the same licence, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. ”

“ I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL) 3 gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval. ”

“ Every such special license shall be in writing, and shall specify the day and hour of the permit to perform or exhibit, or of such parade, procession or open-air public meeting. Every licensee shall pay in advance for such license, for the use of the city or town, a sum not more than three hundred dollars for each day such licensee shall perform or exhibit, or such parade, procession or open-air public meeting shall take place; but the fee for a license to exhibit in any hall shall not exceed fifty dollars. ”

“ Even the burden of reading the license, moreover, is minimized, because a relatively small number of standard-form licenses govern a wide variety of projects available from different open-content suppliers. ”

“ Open-content licenses preserve a commons of informational works because it is well settled (as Jacobsen illustrates) that the author of a work may attach enforceable conditions to authorized uses of the work. [301] There is no comparably settled doctrine, however, in favor of the making of a permanent and non-terminable license of rights under copyright. The statute, to the contrary, expressly circumscribes private action to create a non-terminable license. ”

“ About the Open Government Licence The National Archives has developed this licence as a tool to enable Information Providers in the public sector to license the use and re-use of their Information under a common open licence. The National Archives invites public sector bodies owning their own copyright and database rights to permit the use of their Information under this licence.
The Keeper of the Public Records has authority to license Information subject to copyright and database right owned by the Crown. ”

“ Questions The license on licenses A bit of a confusing concept, but if you have a text on a license, would the text be under copyright or licensed under the license it describes? For instance, Nupedia Open Content License has no indication of its copyright. Would it follow the basic copyright or the NOCL licensing? Another example would be the GNU Free Documentation License. ”

“ However, all the initial declarations on open access, to which I will turn shortly, also specify the lowering of permission barriers as a crucial part of OA. Open licenses are structures that sit on top of copyright and under which the author uses his or her legal intellectual property rights explicitly to allow others to redistribute and, in some cases, modify the work in question. In almost every case this retains the demand for attribution. The most commonly implemented licenses to achieve libre open access are the Creative Commons licenses, covered below in Chapter 3. ”

“ Unrestricted use of a work provides for possible wide exposure. However, without mandatory attribution, unrestricted use allows a user to omit reference to an author and, in such a case, does not serve the author at all. As mentioned before, an author’s rights can be sold; this is the way the great majority of authors earn money nowadays. However, such sales provide considerable material incentives to only a select few, the selection of whom depends least of all on the brilliance of the work.
Legalities No specific law addresses the need for open licenses. So, how would such a license work? ”

“ An unavoidable consequence is that an open-content licensor ordinarily has no way of knowing the identities of all the licensees, for the parties to the license may never communicate.
Third, the universal availability of the content on the terms stated in the license minimizes transaction costs. Open-content licenses are available “off the shelf” to accommodate several types of concerns that may confront users of the licensed works. [32] Use of the works in a fashion consistent with the license entails no greater burden than reading the license ”

“ The CC0 license’s Statement of Purpose, which lacks any parallel in the Public Domain Dedication, may supply a useful interpretive guide to courts or other authorities called upon to construe the license insofar as it explicates and justifies the author’s conscious determination to forgo proprietary rewards in favor of building the commons. For lawyers and policymakers steeped in copyright’s historically dominant proprietary-production paradigm, this concise introduction to the open-content movement’s alternative worldview may be highly valuable. ”

“ Creative Commons licenses Although the GFDL extended open-content licensing principles outside the domain of software, the license remains tied to a specific context, namely, the licensing of software manuals and other texts. Many provisions of the GFDL, such as the references to “title pages,” “cover texts,” “invariant sections,” [123] are difficult to understand or to apply outside the context of literary works. ”

“ There is, correspondingly, a diminished need to become familiar with particularized license terms that may vary from one vendor to the next outside the open-content domain.
Finally, combining the foregoing characteristics yields the defining feature of all open-content licenses: they promote freedom. Open-content licenses expressly authorize a large community of users, at their sole election and without further negotiation or expense, to use a variety of works in a manner that would otherwise infringe copyright. ”

“ Although private parties may be statutorily disabled from crafting licensing instruments that avoid the Copyright Act’s termination provisions, there are some possible arguments that courts might employ to effectuate a licensor’s intent in making a non-terminable grant. As discussed below, however, these arguments may not fully match the force of the argument for termination of an open-content license based on the statute’s literal text. ”

“ Microsoft’s equivalent, you know, attempt at a copyleft license and their other, quote, “open source” licenses, basically says “You can relicense under this or an equivalent license.”. That basically allows anybody to decide what the equivalent license is, and there’ll be courts that argue about what the equivalent license is, and so there would be a struggle about that.
The alternative is to imagine a trusted institution – this is a little bit counter to the kind of Hayekian view that I’ve just been espousing, but – a trusted institution that begins to create lists of equivalence. ”

“ Absent preventive action, however, termination problems may substantially complicate open-content projects in the future.
The natural inclination for open-content advocates would surely be to seek to solve the problem through skillful redrafting of the governing licensing instruments. The CC0 license, while not without flaws, reflects the best recent thinking in this regard; it recognizes its own potential infirmity under existing law and supplies an alternative means to effectuate the licensor’s intent. ”

“ License must not be product-specific. The rights associated with a license extend to products extracted from a larger software aggregate. No restriction on other software. No restrictions are allowed on distribution of open source products bundled with products developed on other software platforms. Technology neutrality. Licenses should not be issued on the basis of the specific technology involved. ”

“ An author’s voluntary selection of an open-content license cannot plausibly be analogized to a transaction in which a powerful licensee pressures an author into an unremunerative exchange. The Copyright Act’s termination provisions were enacted to strengthen authors’ resistance to such pressures, and courts may rightly question why the statute should be applied in circumstances, such as open-content licensing, where these pressures are manifestly absent. ”

“ Abandonment by License Perhaps influenced by highly restrictive judicial interpretations of the copyright abandonment doctrine, open-content advocates have sought to facilitate the growth of an expressive commons by drafting what are, in essence, copyright abandonment licenses—instruments that seek to express, with maximum clarity, an author’s attempt to abandon copyright and dedicate a work to the public domain. ”

“ The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. ”

“ Viability of open licenses
Though many people and corporations consider the concept of an open licensing system foolish, it remains a fact that open licensing opportunities would not be so popular if those using them did not feel it served their interests in some way. A popular example of the way open licensing can benefit creators economically rather than hurt them, is the way in which writer Cory Doctorow published his first novel simultaneously in print and as a free download via a Creative Commons licence. ”

“ Lunch: What Every Developer Should Know About Open Source Licensing, Queue, May 2004, at 41, 42 (“GPL partisans like to call it a ‘protective license’ because it ensures that code covered by it will remain open source forever.”) ; Chris Maxcer, Free Software Licensing, Part 2: Beyond GPL, Linux Insider, July 27, 2007, http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/58530.html (“Basically, though, GPL v2 and v3’s key point is to make the code ‘free forever.’ ”) . ↑ See FSF, GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 3 (2007) , available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html [hereinafter LGPLv3] . ”

“ While there are some reservations about the intentions of the commercial players, the combination of OER providers represents a healthy mixture of different interests. The principles of OER are well established; they benefit from a fairly clear definition which foregrounds the importance of reuse and open licenses. Therefore, any entrants and participants in the field are obliged to behave in an open manner to a large extent. ”

“ As the body of work offered through Creative Commons grows, the ideals behind such open licenses will spread and become more commonplace. Through many of the avenues offered to creators by Creative Commons, commercial rights are maintained while other uses remain possible, allowing many people to benefit from the creativity on the global network today. ”

“ These aspects constitute some of the reasons why advocates believe that it would be beneficial to apply open licenses to academic work in the humanities. It is not a comprehensive list but it does give a flavour. However, sceptics argue that there are risks that come with open licensing – and particularly the more liberal forms of the Creative Commons licenses – and it is to these arguments that I now turn. ”

“ Clarity and flexibility would be the most obvious advantages of an administrative regime to promulgate exceptions to the statute’s termination provisions for open-content licensing. Consulting the agency’s list of nonterminable licenses would provide advance assurances to licensees that contributions to an open-content project would remain in the commons in perpetuity. Furthermore, as licensing instruments continued to evolve, the list of non-terminable licenses could expand as well. ”

“ Katzer had remained, it would have undermined a foundational premise of FOSS licenses.”) . ↑ See Weber, supra note 9, at 59 (“there are inherent limits to software that can be built by one or two people”) . ↑ 17 U.S.C. § 201 (b) (2006) . ↑ See Weber, supra note 9, at 62–65. ↑ See Vetter, supra note 68, at 81 (describing the “web of license interdependency” among contributors to a FOSS project) . ↑ See § 203 (b) (1) . ↑ See Kerry D. Goettsch, Recent Development, SCO Group v. IBM: The Future of Open-Source Software, 2003 U. Ill. J.L. Tech. ”

“ Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable. ”

“ Any attempted assignment or transfer short of those indicated in the statute 'is a mere license, giving the licensee no title in the patent, and no right to sue at law in his own name for an infringement.' [19] The legal position of the holder of a simple, unconditional, nonexclusive license is important. ”

“ Licensor has secured all rights in the Work necessary to grant the license rights hereunder and to permit the lawful exercise of the rights granted hereunder without You having any obligation to pay any royalties, compulsory license fees, residuals or any other payments ”