Licences

A brief explanation of Copyright

Copyright law is about giving authors (creators) control over the copying of their work.

This control is achieved by giving authors of copyrighted works the exclusive right to carry out certain acts, and the exclusive right to authorize others to carry out these acts. Such acts can include:

* making copies of a work
* making copies of substantial parts of a work
* preparing derivative works based on the copyrighted work
* translating a work
* adapting a work to another form (e.g. adapting a novel for a screenplay)
* performing a work (such as a play or a song) in public
* broadcasting a work (such as a television program or a song)
* publishing a work for the first time


There are other rights that may be granted by copyright law, such as an artist's right to the integrity of his or her work, the right to rent out copyrighted works, and the right to record a performer's performance.

The works to which copyright can apply include original literary, artistic, musical, dramatic, choreographic, and architectual works.

Copyright protection arises automatically once a work that meets the statutory requirements is created. However, there are usually distinct advantages to marking a work with a copyright notice and registering copyright. In some countries, it may be necessary to register copyright in a work before you can sue for copyright infringement; and the date that copyright was registered or the work was marked with a copyright notice, relative to the date of infringement, may be relevant to the amount of damages that can be collected for copyright infringement. If matters like these are of concern to you, you should consult a qualified copyright attorney.

If you're a designer who sold the rights to a pattern to a publisher, you might want to review your publishing contract with your attorney. There's a possibility that although you signed away your rights to printed publications, you may have retained your rights to electronic publication. If that's the case, then it may be up to you to ensure that any infringement of your work on the Internet is stopped, and not up to your publisher.

Copyright infringement occurs when someone does with a copyrighted work that which only the copyright owner has the right to do, without permission. When copyright infringement is pursued in a civil action, the remedies may include damages, an accounting of the infringer's profits, and an injunction. It's up to the copyright owner or licensee to enforce copyright.

A brief explanation of Copyleft

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work.

Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works such as computer software, documents, music and art. In general, copyright law is used by an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it and require that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement. Copyleft type licenses are a novel use of existing copyright law to ensure a work remains freely available. The GNU General Public License, originally written by Richard Stallman, was the first copyleft license to see extensive use, and continues to dominate the licensing of copylefted software. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence Lessig, provides a similar license called ShareAlike.

Copyleft can also be characterized as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no ownership of copyright is claimed), copyleft allows an author to impose some restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would more usually be reserved by the copyright holder. Under copyleft, derived works may be produced provided they are released under the same copyleft scheme. The underlying principle is that one benefits freely from the work of others but any modifications one makes must be released under the same terms. For this reason copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses, they have also been described as "viral" due to their self-perpetuating terms.

While copyright law protects the rights of the author by allowing control of distribution and modification, the idea of copyleft is to grant subjective libre freedom to users. Copyleft licenses do not contain clauses which the author considers to impede libre freedom of the user. In computing, free software licenses often require that information necessary for reproducing and modifying the software (e.g. source code) be made available to the user in the same way as the licensed software. The source code files will usually contain a copy of the license terms and acknowledge the author(s).