CSC 379 SUM2008:Week 2, Group 2

Alternative Intellectual Property Models

Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License are two alternative intellectual property models that are used in the software industry, and are now becoming more frequently used for non-software projects. Organizations and projects like Lulu, Wikibooks, and Flickr, utilize these alternative models and facilitate the creation of intellectual works. Examine the ethical considerations surrounding the practice of self-publishing and creation of collaborative works under alternative licenses.

Copyright vs. Copyleft

"'All' is excessive."

What is Copyleft?

All wrongs reserved.

Some History

TinyBASIC, Stallman, EFF, GNU, etc.

GPL (GNU General Public License)

Synopsis

The GNU or General Public License, now in its third version, is a licesne primarily used by GNU programmers and programmers developing free software packages. The license was written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. The GNU project is an operating system that in Unix-like in way it looks, but it is composed of all free software. The GPL it self is a great example of a copyleft license with requires derived works form the project to be available under the same copyleft license. The GPL grants the user of the software free software definition. The means that the user is free to copy the software, change the software, and redistribute the software.

The GPL in HTML

Related Licenses

• GNU Lesser General Public License - is also a free software license that is a compromise between the original GPL and other permissive licenses. The main difference between GPL and LGPL programs is that LGPL programs can be linked to non GPL programs. Then the non GPL program can then be redistributed as long as it is not a derivative work. If it is it has to account for reverse engineering and debugging.

• GNU Free Documentation License - is a copyleft license for free documentation. It gives the readers the ability to copy, redistribute,modify a work, and that all derivative works be available under the same license. Copies can actually be sold but if more than 100 copies are made the source code must be made available. The Free Documentation License is mostly used for manuals, textbooks and other reference materials, it is also the license that Wikipedia uses.

• Affero General Public License - a free software license with a strong copyleft background, dealing with network server software. Very similar to the GPL, except that it makes the user have to have the source code available to any networked user of the AGPL'ed work.

Creative Commons License

All Rights Reserved vs. Public Domain. CC = "some rights reserved". Start here: http://creativecommons.org/about/license/ Think about and discuss implications.

Licensing in the Wild

A Bestiary of Licenses

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Self-publishing, Lulu, Flickr, etc.

Links and Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
• GNU's Awesome License Bestiary
• http://creativecommons.org/
• http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
• http://www.lulu.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://www.flickr.com/