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Author's Right, Copyright and Free Licenses for Culture on the Web/Licenses and Reuse/Data and Licenses

< Author's Right, Copyright and Free Licenses for Culture on the Web

97. What is a copyright license? edit

A copyright license is a contract which grants certain rights to use a work or other protected materials. In fact, in the license agreement, the rights of use are not transferred, but the licensor remains the owner, as opposed to what happens in an assignment agreement. There are several models of open licensing that confer use permissions to all users interested in exploiting the licensed content. Examples of open licenses are:

  • Creative Commons (CC);
  • Open Government License (OGL);
  • Open Data Commons (ODC);
  • Italian Open Data License (IODL).

The different types of information (code, content, data) require different types of licenses. For example, there are licenses designed for content that can be protected by Copyright law, such as Creative Commons licenses, or specific licenses for the software (GNU licenses). It is not enough to apply for a license in order to make a resource ""open".", but the latter must be "open" in terms of real and effective interoperability. In addition, Cultural Heritage Institution can use RightsStatements.org as “labels” that provide a set of 12 standardized rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright and reuse status of digital objects to the public (see above section).

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98. Which are Creative Commons licenses? edit

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the most popular open copyright licenses that allow rights holders to grant a set of permissions to the public for sharing and reusing works.

With regard to the licenses of the CC Creative Commons family, six licenses are identified, generated by as many possible combinations of four clauses, starting from the most open to the most restrictive, where the more the license is restrictive, the more reusability is reduced:

  1. Attribution - Attribution only (CC BY);
  2. Attribution - Share alike (CC BY-SA);
  3. Attribution - No derivative works (CC BY-ND);
  4. Attribution - Non-commercial (CC BY-NC);
  5. Attribution - Non-commercial - Share alike (CC BY-NC-SA);
  6. Attribution - Non-commercial - No derivative works (CC BY-NC-ND).

The BY clause, which requires attribution and the type of CC license used, is mandatory for all six CC licenses.

99. Which Creative Commons licenses and tools are compatible with open access? edit

The definition of “open” is provided by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN): “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”

For cultural heritage, when we refer to open access, we mean content and material released under tools and licenses compatible with the Open Definition provided by OKFN.

Creative Commons licenses compatible with open access are:

  • CC BY, which allows you to share, reproduce and modify a work, even for commercial purposes, with the constraint of attribution of authorship and the license with the work was shared;
  • CC BY-SA, which allows the work to be shared, reproduced and modified even for commercial purposes, with the restriction of attribution and provides for the obligation to release the derivative work with the same license with which the original work was published;
  • CC0 dedication to Public Domain, on the other hand, allows you to release in the public domain around the world a work of which you own the rights. The release into the public domain (by the will of the copyright holder before the expiry of the legal term of protection or of the entitled persons, i.e. the heirs at the time of the expiry of this term) allows to share, reproduce and modify the work, also for commercial purposes, without any restrictions;
  • CC Public Domain Mark (PDM), which is a tool that indicates that a work is not or no longer under copyright protection.
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