Copyright
Purpose of copyright
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants certain powers to Congress.
One of these, in clause 8, is
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
“for limited Times”
Original duration of copyright was 14 years with an option to renew for another 14 years.
But it’s up to Congress. And they have extended it several times.
It now sits at for the life of the author plus fifty years.
Cynically, Congress has extended copyright several times to keep Disney from losing its copyright in Mickey Mouse.
Exceptions to copyright
The copyright holder has the exclusive right to make copies (publish) their work and to make derivative works (translations, adaptations, etc.)
But there are some exceptions.
Uncopyrightable things
In general these things cannot be copyrighted:
Names, titles, slogans, short phrases, ideas, concepts, systems, methods of doing something.
(Patents and trademarks, however, can protect some of those things.)
Fair use
Fair use covers various ways anybody can make use of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.
Basically tries to balance society’s interest in the exchange of ideas and education against the interests supported by copyright in the first place.
17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
“In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”
Licensing
One of the rights copyright holders have is to grant other people permissions to use the copyrighted work in various ways.
For instance, authors often keep the copyright in their books but sell an exclusive license to a publisher to print and sell copies of the book in return for royalties.
Software licenses
It used to be you bought software from a software company and all you could do with it was run it.
In general you didn’t get the source code to the program; you got a version you could run but you couldn’t see how it worked or make changes to it.
You also had no right to make copies for other people. But many companies put in place various mechanisms to try to make sure only people who had actually bought it could run it because copying was so easy.
Source code
But there’s another way to distribute software: as the source code that you use to build the thing you run.
This is what you need if you want to make changes to the program, to fix bugs or make improvements.
These days for lots of reasons software is distributed as source code which raises the question of what people who get the source code are allowed to do with it.
Free Software
vs
Open Source Software
Free software
Software distributed with a license that allows you to do pretty much anything you want with it.
But if you distribute your modified versions of it, you must offer it under the same license as you were granted.
The idea is that the freedom that you had should be passed on. If you’re going to take advantage of the work of the original author, you should be willing to grant the same chance to anyone else.
Open source software
Software distributed with a license that allows you to do pretty much anything you want with it.
And , if you want, you can redistribute the software almost without limitation, other than needing to include the original copyright notice and the license terms for the original software.
In particular, you have the freedom to make your version of the software not open source.
Which is more free?
Creative Commons
By attribution
By attribution, Share alike
By attribution, No derivatives
By attribution, Non-commercial
By attribution, Non-commercial, Share alike
By attribution, Non-commercial, No derivatives
Inspired by free and open source but designed more for non-code things.