Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
about what they are allowed to do with her work. She can use a licence
as specified within the Berlin Declaration, one of the Creative Commons
licences, or a different Open Content licence. Each of these licences
specifies precisely what uses are allowed. Open Content licences, also
called 'copyleft licences' (the practice of using copyright law to remove
restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for
others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified
versions), operate within the boundaries of copyright, but the author
owning the copyright in the work being published waives certain rights.
If a user oversteps the boundaries set by the author, the regular legal
copyright rules apply and the user is violating the author's rights.
Creative Commons licences
An Open Content licence does not necessarily lead to the widest
distribution. The suite of Creative Commons licences illustrates this.
Using a Creative Commons Public Domain licence, authors can add their
work to the public domain (this licence will not be discussed here). The
widest distribution of a work is provided for under a Creative Commons
Attribution licence. Under this licence a work can be copied, distributed,
displayed and performed, the only condition stipulated by the licence
being that the user states the author's name with each use of the work.
Under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, commercial use of the
work and the making of derivative works are permitted. The most
restrictive of the Creative Commons licences, the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivative-Works licence, allows only
limited additional freedom as compared to the legal provisions. Under
this licence, users are allowed to copy the work, distribute it and forward
it, as long as they do not do so commercially. The making of derivative
works under this licence is prohibited.
Within the range between these most liberal and most restrictive
licences, there are four other standard licences. In each of the six
varieties, users are allowed to reproduce the work under licence, include
it in one or more collections and reproduce it from such collections, free
of charge. In addition, they are permitted to distribute copies or audio
recordings of the work, display the work publicly, present or perform it
by means of a digital sound transfer, separately or as part of a collection,
and retrieve and reuse it in databases. Apart from that, basic provisions
