Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to close the doors of educational and research institutions worldwide. Sharing of information, open access to intellectual property became the need of the time. At the time of the crisis, the scholarly community felt tied up due to copyright bindings. The world realized the need for a legal framework that allows sharing of information while protecting the creator's intellectual property rights. The license should be easy to prepare, understand, and share. Creative Commons offers such a supporting legal framework that protects the rights of the authors and allows them to share their work willingly as per the chosen criteria for the last two decades. The chapter discusses the background, attributes and advantages, and challenges of Creative Common's licenses.
TopCopyleft Movement
Academic norms have always promoted open sharing of research findings and creative scholarship. Researchers always considered scholarly communication as a way to gain respect and authority in their respective subject. With time, scholarly communication became an aspect of power. In today’s information world it became a profit generating commodity. Digital information proved as a double sided sword. It facilitated the scholarly communication but it made it vulnerable to easy modifications and misuse. The ethics related to information rights are easily violated in this digital environment. This situation de-motivates the scholars. In such dubious atmosphere where copyright becomes too restricting a copyleft movement got a boost. In general, copyright law disallow recipients to reproduce, adapt, or distribute copies of an author’s work. In contrast, under copyleft, an author may give every person who receives a copy of the work permission to reproduce, adapt, or distribute it while imposing some restrictions. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no ownership of copyright is claimed), copyleft allows the work freely available for adaption and redistribution provided they are released under the compatible copyleft scheme (Wikipedia, (2021).
Copyleft movement initiated many Public Licenses to facilitate and safeguard the scholarly communication. It began long back in 1985 when the GNU General Public License (GPL), originally written by Richard Stallman the first software copyleft license. There are many other public licenses such as GNU Lesser General Public License, BSD License, Apache License, MIT License, Mozilla Public License, Design Science License and so on. Mostly these licenses deals with a particular type of information mainly software (Dean & Frantsvog, 2012). Creative Commons is also one of the Public Licenses but it deals with different types of information. Creative Commons (CC) offers a wide variety of licenses, each granting certain rights. Hence CC licensees are commonly used for design projects (Creative Commons, n.d.).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Intellectual Property: It refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.
Creative Commons: It is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools all over the world.
Creative Commons License: It is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work.”
Copyleft: It is the practice of granting the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created from that property.
Open Access: It is a publishing model for scholarly communication that makes research information available to readers without any financial, legal, or technical barriers to accessing it – that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.
Copyright: It is a legal term used to describe the rights that creators have over their literary and artistic works. Works covered by copyright range from books, music, paintings, sculpture, and films, to computer programs, databases, advertisements, maps, and technical drawings.
Licensing: It is an agreement through which a licensee leases the rights to a legally protected piece of intellectual property from a licensor.