Research 701 ~ Copyright vs Copyleft
Todays class was around creative commons, which is a permissive license designed as a better alternative to copyright. We were shown a video which covered how copying is not stealing. Makes sense if you think about it. Copying is taking something and making a duplicate of it, where as stealing is taking something and leaving nothing.
There is a website called choosealicense which clearly describes the use cases/scenarios that a certain license would cover. An example of one of the licenses is the GNU General Public License v3.0 which gives the following permissions.
- Commercial use
- Distribution
- Modification
- Patent use
- Private use
with the conditions
- Disclose source
- License and copyright notice
- Same license
- State changes
and the limitations
- Liability
- Warranty
This license according to the choosealicense site “lets people do almost anything they want with your project, except to distribute closed source versions.” [source]
Another example license is the MIT license which according to the site “is short and to the point. It lets people do almost anything they want with your project, including to make and distribute closed source versions.” [source] It gives following permissions.
- Commercial use
- Distribution
- Modification
- Private use
with the conditions
- License and copyright notice
and the limitations
- Liability
- Warranty
There are plenty of other licenses to checkout, each with their own set of permissions, conditions, and limitations. I encourage you to explore them and learn more about them if you are ever wanting to start a project or use/get involved with one. I also encourage you to watch an amazing, yet sad documentation on a person named Aaron Swartz called The Internets Own Boy. Aaron Swartz played a big part in the push of creative commons and the world owes more to him than can ever be realized.