These last few days, I’ve been releasing and publishing a few important things: research tools, companion web sites and my new blog. One issue to consider when publishing content is the license that you’ll attach to it. Although I am not a lawyer (IANAL), I’ve been looking at these issues for the past years and I find them fascinating. For example, if I put a picture, that I took, in my web gallery and I say that it is copyrighted under my name, you cannot take the picture and put it on your big magazine ad without my consent. Same thing for a story that I would send you in a PDF file (and I’ve done that): you cannot publish it and make money out of it without my consent.
One catch with copyrights is this little exception called “fair use” (or “fair dealing” in Canada and other common law-based countries). Fair use allows you to cite my work or to reproduce a part of it, if it is to “stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public” (from wikipedia). For example, you could cite a paragraph of my last short story on your web site and it would be considered fair use. The details of this exception though are quite complicated and are purposely fuzzy. New medias, new ways of producing, reproducing and transforming content are constantly invented so a strict definition of fair use would certainly not foster creativity and enrichment of the general public. Sometimes, like in the Harry Potter decision, even the Court struggles to find whether a particular use should be considered fair use.
Like I said, copyrights are protected by laws and sometimes, these laws evolve to protect the industry, but not the creators. For example, the music industry is pushing a lot to forbid you to convert your CDs into music files like MP3 (look for Michael Geist’s web site for a complete coverage of copyrights law in Canada). And the worst of it, is that the industry is an incurable offender of copyrights law: for example, I know some companies and public institutions that put photographs in their ad campaign without paying a cent to the photographer (or they pay a small price for one use and then use it in a way that was not covered in the contract).
So, what are the other options? What if I want other people to reuse my work as much as they want without requiring them to write to me every time to request a permission? Well, I can say that I give my content to the public domain and that everybody can use it the way they want. You can do this for any kind of content, even software. If you change your mind later on, anything that you put in the public domain will stay there (but you can copyright future work though). Unfortunately, doing this can bring you dark clouds (but your karma goes up, so it balances right).
For example, consider the case where I release a excel-like tool to the public domain. A business owner sees this and decides to use my software to do his accounting. At the end of the year, he submits his tax forms and two months later, get a visit from two men in black. It turns out that there was a bug in my excel-like tool and the business owner forgot to pay a couple of millions to the government. Because he has to pay a lot of interests and fees, he decides to sue me. I am responsible for this bug and it cost him a great deal of money. Whoops! My point is, you might want to toss in a few sentences saying that you provide no warranty and that you cannot be held responsible for anything.
Now, what if somebody takes a picture I took, put some racist comments on it, and say that the picture was taken by me. Whoops (you’re probably seeing a pattern there). You probably now want to provide some restrictions on when credit should be given to you.
These are two small examples of things that can go wrong when releasing content to the public domain. That is why I usually consider using an existing license safer. There are many organizations that carefully thought about all of these issues and that wrote licenses that you can use to publish your own work. These licenses usually give you some options to choose. The main ones are:
Attribution: Basically, when you use a license like that, you allow anybody (even companies) to use your work, reproduce it or modify it as long as they give you credit for it. These licenses include things like when you should be given credit (e.g., it should be clear that you are not the author of the new work that resulted from your work) or what kind of warranty you provide (i.e., none). Creative Commons Attribution License is a good example of this. For software, the Apache License is also a good example: if I modify your software released under the Apache License, I can license the new software the way I want, even make money out of it, as long as I give you credit for the original software. Personally, I am always reluctant to use these kinds of licenses because it gives a free ride to people who do not contribute at all to the community (whatever the community is). By the way, companies typically LOVE those licenses.
Share alike: If you use a share alike license, you allow anybody to do whatever they want with your work, as long as they give you credit and they use the same license on any work derived from yours. These licenses are often compared to viruses, because they propagate to other content by definition. For example, if I write a story and I license it with a share alike license, you can take it, make some modifications (or not) and then start selling a book containing that story. The thing is, you will be obliged to provide a free version of your story with this license, so that a third person can take your story, modify it, and so on. You can guess why companies typically HATE those licenses. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the GNU General Public License (for software) are good examples. Personally, I like these licenses for creative content (novel, photographs, drawings) and this is why the pictures in my web gallery are now released under this kind of licenses. For software, I think it really depends on the type of software you are releasing.
No commercial: The last type of license for today. There are licenses that make available your work for free with some restrictions. For example, you may want to forbid commercial use of your work (e.g., Creative Commons Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) or you may allow the use of your work for academic purpose only. One reason you might want to do this is if you want to distribute the work you do for a living for free (e.g., you are a photograph) to “normal” people, but you still want to be paid if a commercial entity use your work because this is your bread and butter.
I’ll probably put a post on software licenses next week: I’ve been reading a lot on these lately because of the two software projects I’m releasing. Now that you are educated, go produce something and release it 
