Choosing a license

Deciding on a license

This is usually a hard issue:

• You should first consider the terms under which you want to release your works. There are many possibilities, from the most restrictive ones (no use or reditribution allowed, all rights reserved) to the most open ones (releasing it to the public domain). A good help on the most relevant options to consider can be found at the Creative Commons web site. In short, some of the things you may want to consider are:
• Basic terms
• Attribution: do you want others to acknowledge your work? This will usually be the case as it matches standard academic culture and allows you to get recognition for your efforts
• Derivative works: do you want your work to be modifiable by others? Again, common academic culture favours this, as advancement of our knowledge relies on building upon previous work to reach frther heights, but you may be concerned that changes might detract from the perceived quality of your work.
• Commercial use: do you want to allow commercial use of your work? Traditionally, commercial companies had the role of exploiting the knowledge produced by academia. Nowadays this is discussed as academics are required to guarantee a direct return on their works and the public questions whether public funded results should be allowed to be appropriated by commercial companies without any investment or return.
  
• License propagation: do you require your license to be respected and carried over to derivative works or copies? Again this will usually be the case, but a point can be made if someone adds significantly to your work but would like different licensing restrictions. On the other hand you may require the terms to be propagated and later negotiate additional agreements with interested parties.
• Special terms
• Jurisdiction: most normally you will want a generic license with the widest application, but you must always remember that different Countries have different laws and some tuning may be needed.
• Public Domain: this meand you leave out any copyright claims and essentially offer your work to the public at large to do with it as they wish
• Geopolitical conditions: it is also possible to make a distinction on special issues so that different licenses will apply depending on them (e.g. allow broader freedoms to developing countries while requiring royalties from developed nations)
• Partial licensing: you may want to allow use of parts of the work but not all of it (e.g. sampling of a movie or song, using no more than one chapter form a book...)
• Reduced copyright duration: in today's quickly changing world you may want to retain copyright for a short time acknowledging that it will be obsolete and meaningless afterwards instead of a full legal term.
• GNU Copyleft terms: these allow people to use your under stringent terms to ensure freedom (see the FSF or CC sites for more details).
• Non-exclusion of rights: whatever you decide, you must always keep in mind that you, as the author retain all rights to the work, which means you are always free to also release it under different licensing terms if you so wish. This means that you may for instance forbid commercial use by default, but if a company calls your door you may agree to issue them an additional license allowing commercial use under royalties.
  

• Next you must ensure that you are legally allowed to release your work under those terms.
  
• If it is all your own (e.g. because you made it at home, on your own time, using your own resources, and without any contractual restriction with your employer), then you can do as you wish.
  
• If you did the work under contractual restrictions, like on paid time (e.g. by your employer, at work, or under a grant from a funding agency) or under contractual restrictions (e.g. under a non-disclosure agreement or under a restrictive employment contract) then you will need to check with your employer, funding entity or contractual stakeholders and verify with them it is OK to release your work under your chosen terms (or negotiate which terms are acceptable).
• Finally, you must draw the legal text stating unambiguously the terms under which your work is licensed. This is a terribly difficult task (unless you opt for one of two options which we'll talk about later) requiring legal advice.
  
• If your work is entirely yours, then again you have two options:
• look for professional legal advice (and pay for it out of your own pocket) to write the license for you (this only makes sense if you expect to make up for the costs by selling your work)
  
• use one of the many already existing licenses that matches your desired terms
• If your work is bound to an organization, it is best to contact their legal department and ask them to either
• draft a license stating your terms (actually leaving all the legalese to professionals) or
• sanction or approve an already existing license you present them

In general, you will find that the best, easiest and more expedite course is to look for an already existing license which covers your terms and either use it or ask your legal department to approve of it. Your main responsability in this case is to make sure that the license chosen is legally correctly written so it is enforceable and will actually defend your interests.

The Creative Commons Web Site

Your best starting point at this stage is the Creative Commons Web site. There you will find help to decide on the most common options and terms related to releasing works in the wild, as well as ready to use licenses written by professionals who have already taken the pain of investigating and drafting the licenses and ensuring they are legally binding and enforceable.

Using the CC site is easy as a breath: just select the terms under which you want to release your work, get the associated license and use it (or produce it to your legal department for approval). In the CC site you will find as well instructions on how to associate the license to your works, short descriptions of the licenses and full legal text of the same, neat logos to allow for easy license identification and links to the descriptions and text.