WHAT ARE THESE COPYRIGHTS?! You can see and hear about them everywhere but still don’t fully understand what they’re about? Copyright issues on YouTube or copyright claims on Instagram, all of them relate to creative work and all of them have to be respected. Let’s have a more deeper look about the most important characteristics of copyrights nowadays .
Copyrights are the exclusive rights to use, copy, and distribute creative work. The work has to be tangible, or in other terms being perceived by others.
A license is a permission to undertake some activity (to use a software for example).
Duties and obligations come with a license. The entity that wrote the software is the copyright-owner which has the exclusive right to use, copy and distribute the software.
A trademark – a word or symbol used to describe a company, product or service (branding)
A patent – exclusive right to make, use and sell an invention. A software can be patented.
The software code we can view and edit in an editor is subject to copyright. What the software does when it executes can be subject of patent. In order for somebody other than an owner of copyright, trademark or patent to get the benefits of those items, a license must exist.
Open source main principles:
The Open source initiative is the most authoritative source for guidance
- Free redistribution: the code from the Open source project must not require a royalty/fee.
- The program must include source code and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form.
- The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be redistributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
- The integrity of author’s code must be contained.
- No discrimination against persons or groups
- No discrimination against fields of endeavour
- Distribution of only one license required to secure rights, no subsequent activities must be carried out in order to use, modify or distribute the code
- License must not restrict to product
- The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software, it doesn’t require that your entire project itself has to be open sourced.
- The software has to be open to a variety of technologies and interfaces
A software licence is a permission to use software. May include rights to modify and distribute the software.
- The word copyright/copyright symbol
- The year of the first publication
- The rights owner
- The right statement
Public domain – its intellectual property protections have lapsed/expired/cannot be ascertainable (no license required).
We cannot eliminate the existence of the copyright, because by law it just gets created upon creation, and when it can be perceived by somebody else. The only way, that one can legally use software created by another, is by way of licence.
The most prevalent licences today:
- GPL (general public license)
- MIT (the copyleft)
- Apache (commercial permissive category)
- BSD
- Mozilla public license
GPL : most extensive open source licenses available today
With GPL, just possessing a copy does not require acceptance (no contract exists). You can make modifications and never release them outside your organization. You can use GPL if you care about controlling distribution and you want to ensure your code does not end up getting consumed into proprietary code with no benefits to the greater open source community.
MIT: states explicitly that anybody who obtains a copy of license software is free to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sub-license or sell copies of the software. You are free to include MIT covered code in your proprietary code without the worry of the resulting code being subject to the MIT license (contrary to the GPL). With the MIT license, you are free to create derived works and license that derived work under a completely different license. If you don’t care to place any restrictions on how people use your software and are not interested in what happens to your software from subsequent distributions, then the MIT license will work for you.
Apache version 2: considered the most commercially favorable. It contains a patent license grant. You’re free to include Apache code in your proprietary code without the worry of affecting the copyright status of your existing proprietary code. There is no requirement to share any or all of the modifications you make. What you need to make sure of in these cases is to clearly specify which code falls under certain licenses. The Apache License has an embedded contributor license agreement (agreement between the project and a contributor).
A permissive license (BSD, MIT, Apache) – it places a few if any obligations on the part of the individual/entity using the code.
Copyleft – when the creator wants to make sure others have the right to use, copy and distribute my work. This is different from permissive licenses which allows you to re-license subsequent works under a different license, if you want.
Design the Web 