Rights and Licensing

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 10 min
Duration: 0 min

Questions

• What is licensing?

• Do I need to license my work?

• Who owns the rights to my work?

Objectives

• Understand what parts of your university’s rights and licensing policy apply to you.

• Know where to get help.

What is licensing?

When software is created it is automatically copyrighted. The owner of the copyright (the ‘rights holder’) can do things with it that other people can’t. A license lets people do things that they couldn’t otherwise do.

Normally, we can’t legally copy someone else’s intellectual property, for example. We normally can’t sell it. And we definitely can’t sell it and claim that we made it ourselves. These are examples of rights that we would infringe upon without an appropriate license. Most software licenses you’re familiar with will let you copy software, at least once to put it on your computer. Other licenses will let you make more copies, and distribute them – some will even let you sell the software or versions of it that you extend. Certain very ‘broad’ licenses waive all rights (i.e. you still have those rights but you’ve agreed that nothing people do will infringe them).

Do I really need to license stuff?

Yes. If you don’t, no one can do anything with your code or software. And, if you have collaborators, no one includes you.

What kind of licenses are there?

The major kinds of licenses we’re concerned about are open source licenses. These licenses embrace four freedoms:

1. The freedom to use
2. The freedom to modify
3. The freedom to distribute
4. The freedom to distribute modifications

You can get a good idea of which open source license is right for you by looking at https://choosealicense.com/.

Of course, you can choose any of a large number of different licenses (or write your own), but established licenses give people confidence to run and build on your software. The more custom a license is, the more people will worry about unintended effects.

Who decides what license to use?

The license must be decided by the rights holder. If you’re writing software on your own at home, this is almost certainly you. There may, however, be other considerations. While it’s not a strict hierarchy, the rough order to check is:

• Your software might include components that place restrictions on modifications
  • E.g. ‘Copyleft’ licenses mean you can’t apply a closed license to software that includes copylefted work
• Whoever funds your research may have rules about who owns what you produce and how it’s licensed
• Your employer (i.e. university) will probably be the rights holder for software you develop as part of your job
  • Universities are usually happy to grant you the rights to software you’ve written provided you can show that it has no realistic commercial development opportunities

Finding out 10 min

Take ten minutes now to find out who is the rights holder for your current project. If you don’t have a current software/code-writing project, who would hold the rights if you did?

1. If you have already written software, does it have dependencies that have copyleft licensing?
   • If not, it’s possible you may be forbidden from building on these works.
   • This is unlikely, but it can happen.
2. Check your funding arrangement if you have one – it might say who is the rights holder for work you produce, or perhaps state which licenses you can use.
3. Check your university policy.
   • This may be different for students.
   • and faculty .
4. If none of these say anything relevant, then you are the rights holder and you can use any license you like. If you don’t care, use a public domain license like the unlicense.

Totally lost?

Take this time to send an email to your supervisor, librarian, administrator, or someone else who might be able to answer the question “who owns code/software that I write in my research?”

By now you should know who will be the rights holder for code and software you write. You should know how to ask them to let you choose an appropriate license for your code or software. If you run into difficulties, you should know where to get help.