In recent days and months we are seeing how much of the news related to culture or controversies, are related or revolve around copyright and the issue of licenses. Today I wanted to collect this topic in an informative way so that many, especially newbies to this topic, have an overview of the topic. To begin with, say that every work has a physical property and an intellectual property. In the case of a gallery, the painter would have the intellectual property of the work and the physical owner of the collection, a museum, for example, would have the physical property of the gallery. On the case of the book and the ebook, Intellectual property is often based on the rights to the work, in other words, copyright, rights of reproduction of the work and property rights. Thus a work can have an author and that this is not the owner of the work nor the owner of the work has all the reproduction rights. It is a mess, I admit it, but in this tangle of terms and ideas many of the current problems of the book and ebook market move.
Licenses What are they?
To solve the rights problems of a work, it was developed the licensing formula. Every work has a license and according to that license the owner of the work can do some things or others with it. Licenses range from the most restrictive where the owner of the book can only read it to the most permissive where the owner of the book can be part of the authorship of the book. In this small overview, I am going to show you the most popular and most used licenses.
- Copyright. Bill copyright is the most restrictive license and almost the only one until the arrival of the new technologies. This type of license gives the owner all the rights to the work, both its reproduction, as well as its distribution and / or commercialization. Although copyright is not removed by any of these licenses, the author has little to do if his work is copyrighted and he is not the holder of that license.
- The Copyleft. Bill Copy left is the quintessence of Copyright. If he Copyright is the most restrictive license, the copyleft It is the most open license, so much so that you can even participate in the work, clearly indicating the part of authorship of each author. The name of this license was created from an English word play regarding Copyright, «Right »/» Left«. Both licenses are the extremes of the intellectual property licenses, the rest of the licenses move between these points.
- GPL license. GPL is short for Generic Public License, Generic Public License, its use is focused on the computer world, which was the first to develop intellectual property licenses, before the great boom of computer companies. This license allows to reproduce the work or the code in the technological case and distribute, but always under the same formula
and without commercial rights,that is, you cannot charge for the work that is under this license. At the time, the use of the GPL license was a revolution, but it was soon seen that for intellectual works that were not technological, it did not have much support. - Creative Commons licenses. These licenses are the youngest although they already have their time. They are licenses similar to the GPL, with the difference that they are adapted to all areas and not only to the technological one, in fact, they were born in response to the gaps that the GPL license created in textual works such as books or cinematographic works. The best thing about this type of license and what has allowed its rapid spread worldwide is that they are customizable. You can create one Creative Commons license that requires you to license your work under the same license and that it can be used for commercial distribution or it can be made completely free but that it cannot be used for commercial distribution. The author decides.
- State licenses. In addition to the licenses that we have commented that are those that exist anywhere in the world both to adopt them and to prohibit them, there are many types of licenses that are more personal than the previous ones, that is, they are limited in many cases to the territory of a country or a certain aspect. A good case would be the last license that CEDRO has taken out for which price I pay the organization, we can reproduce the work that we indicate. I will not extend much more of this type of licenses since there are many and with technological means they are also the least used.
Considerations on the subject
As you can see, I have limited myself to listing the main licenses and to tell you very little about them, Why? Well, because the good that the phenomenon of Free Culture is that each work and author are adapted to what is best for everyone, both for the author himself and for his reader, which in the end will be the great factor to take into account. At the end of the article I put you some interesting ebook on the subject, although on the Net there is a lot written on this subject, not in vain is it the center of controversy in the world of ebook and book. Ah, this article is copyrighted, although you can participate in it through the comments.
[UPDATE 2-12]
The GPL license can be used for the commercialization of the product. That is, a work, or in the greatest number of cases in which the GPL license is used, a computer program, the author or user can package and commercially distribute the product, as long as it respects the original license. Sorry for the mistake and thanks to the users for telling me.
More information - The first website for the legal use of publications subject to copyright arrives, India questions copyright
Video - David scene
How does the GPL not allow charging? Of course you can, and there are a lot of GPL-licensed products on the market, which are sold for a goose buck. The main requirement of the GPL is that the modifications be redistributed on the same terms (hence it is called a viral license), but it says nothing on the economic issue.
Well I'm going to look at it and correct it if that. As far as I understood, the price they put on GPL software is not for the product but for the support or the means of distribution. But they have either changed it or I am confused. I look at it in the license and I'll tell you, in addition to correcting it, of course. Thanks for the contribution and for reading us. Greetings.
Actually, the GPL is very simple, and it only has 4 requirements (what is known as the 4 freedoms it provides):
- Freedom to run whatever program.
- Freedom to see how it is made and to modify it
- Freedom to redistribute copies
- Freedom to redistribute the modifications that are made
With the addition that redistributions must be done on the same terms, that is, giving the same freedoms to whoever you give it to.
The GPL is intended for programs, but it is also applicable to literary works, although it is a bit strange because in books there is no difference between "executing" it (which would be reading it) and accessing how it is made (which would also be reading it 🙂). In that case, the first two freedoms would say more or less the same thing, and the others would give the right to redistribute both the original and the modifications. Note that it does not specify that redistribution should be free, and in fact charging for them is perfectly GPL compliant (and is often done). What has to exist is the possibility of doing it.
Anyway, although the GPL is applicable to literary works, existing things like Creative Commons does not make much sense.
Hello Jesus, I have looked at the GPL and you are right. I was left in the Debian mess and I thought that it had been maintained but I have seen that they changed it. Let me explain, when the Debian boom came out (Ubuntu almost did not exist) many downloaded the Debian CD, recorded it and charged almost the same as a Windows. Given this, the controversy arose whether it was legal or not. It seems that it was allowed but from what I see the license has been modified so that it is not as immoral as the case that I have exposed. Right now it is not possible for me to modify it but I will modify it before Monday. As for what you say about authorship. Authorship is more of an ethical and / or moral right than a legal one, everyone recognizes it although few consider it legally. My idea with the article was to give a general, legal and morally correct vision rather than trying to show the harsh reality. Although I should have specified what you are commenting on, I do not think that it would benefit that right much even if it had to have omitted the truth. I am sorry. Thanks for the comments and contributions, I take them into account and as soon as possible I make the modifications. Greetings.
To qualify a couple of things, I would say that copyleft licenses do not force you to acknowledge anyone's authorship. In fact, that requirement (and some like it) may just be the reason why a license is not considered purely copyleft. For example, some variant of Creative Commons, such as the one that prevents commercial use, is not considered copyleft for that reason, because it imposes excessive restrictions. In short, the main requirement for a license to be copyleft, apart from being open (allowing things to be done, come on), is that it be "viral", that is, that it requires redistributions to be made under the same terms.
The one that would give "maximum" freedom is another that you do not put, and that would be directly the public domain. Here there is total freedom to do what you want, both with the original and with the redistributions. If you want, you can take a classic of literature that is already in the public domain (Don Quixote, for example), change the name of a character, say that you are the author and sell it for 100 euros per copy. You probably won't make a lot of money (or make a lot of friends), but it would be perfectly legal.
I put the maximum freedom in quotation marks because there is much debate about whether the public domain really gives more freedom than a copyleft license, since it gives it to the one who makes the modifications, but takes it away from everyone else. On the other hand, a copyleft license, although it restricts certain things to the author / publisher, ensures that all potential readers have the same rights, so that, globally, it could be considered more free.