This document discusses copyright and licensing. It explains that copyright law governs how others can use your work and software, whether you must share source code, and how much you could be sued for infringement. It describes different types of licenses from closed licenses to open licenses like BSD and GPL, distinguishing between non-viral and viral licenses. Fair use is discussed as an exception that allows limited use of copyrighted works. The history of open source licensing and newer visual licenses are also covered.

4. Who cares about copyright?
You should care because your decisions influence such factors as:
 How others can legally use your software
 If your own projects become “infected” by a license you didn’t
choose
 Whether you must distribute source code if you distribute or
even use software to serve up content
 How others can use your photos on Flickr and other sources
 Understanding how Wikipedia and other open references
work
 Whether you get sued for a LOT of money.

5. How much is a lot?
See the TED talk entitled “The $8 Billion
iPod”.
Theoretically, up to $150,000 per instance.

6. Not covered here….
The many flavors of patents
Trademarks
Trade Secrets
Contract law
Cat videos

7. Jurisdiction matters
 This talk is focused around the United States. Within
the U.S., copyright law is consistent between states
because it is federal law and cannot generally be
modified by the states.
 In fact, copyright law is relatively consistent worldwide
because of the multitude of treaties concerning it,
though some countries are more selective about
enforcement than others.
 However, other types of “intellectual property”, such as
trade secrets, may vary from state to state in the U.S.

8. What is Copyright?
 Federal law, with a lot of influence from
international treaties (Universal Copyright
Convention, Geneva Phonograms Convention,
Berne Convention, WTO Agreement, WIPO
Copyright Treaty, WIPO Performances and
Phonograms Treaty)
 Authority for Congress to regulate is spelled
out in the Constitution

9. What you need for Copyright
 A literary, musical, dramatic, pantomime,
choreographic, pictorial, graphic, sculptural,
motion picture, audiovisual, sound recording, or
architectural work
 The work must be in a “fixed medium”
 Source code qualifies
 17 USC §117 outlines special rights for software
rights holders

10. What is a license?
 Most generally, permission to do something: e.g. practice
law, drive a car, or operate an amateur radio station
 Copyright licenses are more or less promises not to sue,
although there isn’t a terribly clear line drawn between what
constitutes a copyright license and what constitutes a
contract (most commonly an adhesion contract).
 The difference is slightly technical but has impact on such
factors as whether mandatory arbitration might apply

11. Closed Licensing
 “All Rights Reserved”
 So-called “Shrink wrap agreements”- putatively an
adhesion contract, mostly untested in court, generally
not very user-friendly
 You can think of most websites as being closed in
terms of licensing; even if the content is free, NYT
doesn’t want you running off with their stuff

12. The Safe thing
 Don’t eat random fruit from the forest.
 Some sites such as Flickr and Wikipedia make it
easy to look up the licensing of posted items, and
Wikipedia even undertakes active policing to
ensure that media is openly licensed
 Just bear in mind that whatever you find, you
need to make sure the license lines up with the
way you want to use the material

13. Fair Use
 The essential idea is that while the copyright
holder usually has broad control over the work,
there are exceptions to that exclusivity for public
policy reasons
 17 USC §107- it’s a question of fact and can be
very difficult to work out in a particular case
 Generally, okay to use parts of works reasonably
necessary for personal use, reporting news,
education, or parodies

14. A bit of history
AT&T UNIX  BSD
Stallman, aka rms (emacs, GNU, Lisp)
vs. Bill Joy (vi, Sun, C)- key figure in BSD
West coast vs. East coast

15. Non-viral licensing
Does not contaminate the code your
working on, e.g. BSD and MIT licenses
I think it’s fair to say that most licenses
are non-viral

16. Viral Licenses
 GPL: if you modify code and wish to distribute,
you must distribute the source as well
 LGPL: slightly less restrictive; meant for
libraries
 AGPL: more restrictive, bunch of interesting
provisions related to DMCA/modern treaties,
designed for network server software

17. Viral Licenses
Keep in mind that viral licensing only
works because of the way the law gives
rightsholders exclusivity
If the law wasn’t restrictive, they
couldn’t write such an onerously “free”
license

18. Derivative Works
 17 USC §101: A “derivative work” is a work based upon
one or more preexisting works, such as a translation,
musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization,
motion picture version, sound recording, art
reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other
form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or
adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions,
annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which,
as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a
“derivative work”.

19. Open Hardware
 The Arduino- an interesting hybrid of
licensing

20. Newer Licenses are more visual

21. “Non-Commercial”
 In order to qualify as “open hardware”, you must allow
commercial use. The idea is to encourage vendor support
and allow tinkering without fussing too much over what is
commercial or not
 Ultimately, what is and is not commercial in nature is a
question of fact and may be very difficult to determine.
 “Best Practice” is probably to stay away from these
licenses, although I’m not practicing what I’m preaching-
you may have noticed that these slides are licensed for non-
commercial use only.

22. Choosing a license
BSD, MIT, GPL, CC….what does it all mean?
Short answer: not that important if you are
choosing.
There are a lot of licenses out there, but if you
are interested in licensing your project openly, I
recommend OSI-approved licenses.
Opensource.org