Intellectual Property

We should start by defining the subject of copyright: the creative work. The creative work must be original, creative, and fixed in a tangible medium. It must also fall into one of the eight broad categories of creative works that are protected under copyright (given below). Other categories are not under the protection of copyright, e.g. facts and data, however their expression may be.

1. literary works,
2. musical works,
3. dramatic works,
4. pantomimes and choreographic works,
5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works,
6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works,
7. sound recordings, and
8. architectural works.

First, a work is in the public domain if it is not under copyright. Typically, this means it is old enough that the copyright has expired. Note that more recent commentary on an older work may still be protected by copyright, so if you are copying a modern copy of the work with ancillary materials be careful to distinguish between what is in the public domain and what is not.

Second, a work that is under copyright may be dedicated to the public domain by the copyright holder. The work is in the public domain to the extent applicable law allows.

The Creative Commons organization has made two symbols of convenience to indicate these conditions. PD or indicates the first scenario and CC0 or indicates the second.

Learn More from Creative Commons.

Violating copyright and plagiarism should not be conflated. A copyright violation is concerned with legal rights, whereas plagiarism is concerned with ethics. One can commit both, one, or neither. For example, using a large portion of one of Mark Twain’s public domain works without attribution would be considered plagiarism, not copyright violation. But using a contemporary scholar at length without attribution would be both plagiarism and copyright violation. However, quoting a short passage of a contemporary scholar and properly citing it is neither copyright violation nor plagiarism.

Furthermore, copyrighted works may be licensed for particular uses. When a copyrighted work is licensed its use becomes subject to both copyright law and contract law – where there are disagreements contract law typically prevails.

A wealth of copyright information is available from Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright & Fair Use site

Works under closed licenses may be electronically enforced (for digital works) through the use of so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. These technologies prevent a work’s distribution, copying, printing, or modification, etc. Works protected in such a way may be considered DRM-limited.

Other closed licenses rely on trust or other less draconian methods of rights enforcement. These licenses don’t use DRM and tend to have liberal within group sharing policies, for example, the SpringerLink database lets an institution’s community download and keep in perpetuity the e-books they provide. These works are often described as DRM-free.

Open licenses come in numerous flavours, but can be broadly divided into Open Access and Open Source licenses, however the distinction is often blurred. Two organizations provide popular models of open licenses: Creative Commons and Free Software Foundation/GNU.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides six different internationally compatible licenses:

• BY (Open for any purpose so long as attribution is given)
• BY-SA (Attribution requirement and any resultant works must be licensed in the same way)
• BY-ND (Attribution requirement and no modifications/adaptions allowed)
• BY-NC (Attribution requirement and no commercial usage)
• BY-NC-SA (Attribution requirement and no commercial usage and any resultant works must be licensed in the same way)
• BY-NC-ND (Attribution requirement and no commercial usage and no modifications/appropriations allowed)

Learn more about these licenses

GNU Free Software Foundation

These licenses seek to enable “Four Freedoms”:

1. The freedom to use the work for any purpose.
2. The freedom to adapt the work.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies of the work.
4. The freedom to improve the work.

The most common one in non-computer science/engineering areas is the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Other licenses are software-focused and include: The GNU Public License and the Lesser GNU Public License.