An Example of Copyright Licensing
Wikipedia, the great collaborative encyclopedia project, is a great example of how copyrights work. Wikipedia, of course, allows anyone and everyone to write and modify articles on pretty much all topics in existence. So here’s how the copyright chain works on Wikipedia:
Article written. Author automatically owns the copyright to that article, under our US copyright law.
Author wants to post the article on Wikipedia. Wikipedia asks the author to “license” the use of the article to them.
In the license, the author agrees that Wikipedia can post the article. The author also agrees that Wikipedia can let other people use the article, copy it, or modify it.
Wikipedia has a license to use all the material posted on it’s website, and under that license Wikipedia allows other people to copy and use their articles anywhere else – as long as they 1) include a statement saying the article came from Wikipedia, and 2) they allow other people the right to copy, change, and otherwise use the articles the same way Wikipedia does.
The original author of the article still owns the copyright, and is free to use the article in other ways, too.
The written license Wikipedia uses for it’s articles was developed for the written manuals accompanying opensource software. It’s called the GNU Free Documentation License, and you can read a copy of it here. It’s long, but written in mostly pretty plain language.
The agreement between the article authors and Wikipedia is here, and it explains that one of the things the author is agreeing to is that Wikipedia can license the article to others under the GNU license.
The point I am making here is that the authors of the articles can choose to make their work freely available, or they can choose not to do so. In contexts other than WIkipedia, they could also choose to allow some uses and not others, in any variation and configuration they choose. This is true for all types of copyrighted works, not just written material. So let’s consider music for a moment, about which there is so much contention right now. Musicians that choose to make their music freely available can do so - but not if they have already licensed the right to make that decision to a publisher or record company. Then, only the publisher or record company can make that decision. A musician that wants to retain the right to make that decision can do so. And a musician that does not want to make their music freely available does not have to do so, at least until the term of the copyright runs out. The copyright owners have full freedom of choice in what they do with their works.
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