Internet | Unpacking copyright licenses

By Anna Malczyk

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Copyright licenses have received a lot of attention recently. The internet has created a space that allows anyone to share content across national boundaries and without incurring high costs. With copyright infringement becoming a greater concern, this new environment has caused people to rethink how copyright does – and should – work. Here is a breakdown of the three categories that copyright can fall into, and how each one works.

Copyright basics
A copyright is basically a bundle of exclusive rights that a content creator or content owner (not necessarily the same party) is granted in a creative work (a song, novel, movie or drawing, for example). Copyright primarily allows the creator to benefit financially from a creative work and otherwise exploit that work without fear of someone else doing likewise.  It is a legal framework that was designed to stimulate and protect creativity. As soon as you set your creative idea down in its concrete form (type your story, record your track), copyright automatically vests. The phrase “all rights reserved” describes copyright’s exclusivity pretty well. It means that people who don’t have the copyright owner’s permission can’t exercise any of the rights that make up copyright. For example, a standard copyright allows anyone to read your novel, but prohibits them copying the text and sharing it for free online. Every copyright expires eventually – in South Africa, this happens 50 years after the death of the creator.

Generally speaking, if someone wants to exercise any of those exclusive rights (making copies, selling the work, publishing it and so on), they need the copyright owner’s permission. Permission is usually granted in the form of a license that sets out the parameters of the permissions granted to that person by the copyright owner.

Some rights reserved
The “some rights reserved” approach is a step down from the harshness of the “all rights reserved” position, which isn’t conducive to content sharing. Its purpose is to clarify certain allowed actions up-front, to cut out the process of having to ask for permission to make certain uses of a work. For example, a “some rights reserved” license can state that anyone can copy and share a creative work, but may not use it for commercial purposes – you’ll need to ask permission to make a commercial film out of it, but can share it for free with friends whenever you want. Special licenses like Creative Commons licenses or the GNU General Public License simplify the process by allowing you to attach pre-made conditions to your work.

No rights reserved
“No rights reserved” is the other extreme. It is basically a waiver of copyright in a creative work. While not a license per se, this position is a declaration that the copyright owner has no desire to enforce his or her rights and is releasing that creative work into the public domain. An example of how this can occur is the CC0 statement that Creative Commons formulated. In a similar vein, any work whose copyright has expired (50 years after the death of the creator) automatically enters the public domain – which means that no rights are reserved. A public domain or no-rights-reserved work can be used for any purpose, including commercial: for example, anybody can publish and sell Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or create a film adaptation. The only perpetual right that remains is the right to be identified as the author of the work – which means you can’t publish Pride and Prejudice under anyone else’s name. That right is known as a moral right.

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution license.