Chapter 9: Intellectual Property
Which of these do you believe is true?
- As a student, you own every piece of software you write for course assignments. If the university wants to use that software in any way other than for giving you a grade, they need your permission: you can say "no" or ask for payment.
- You own the software you write for course assignments as long as you do the work on your own computer. If you use a university's machines, they have an equal right to the software: you can continue developing it or sell it if you want, but they can too, and they don't need your permission.
- If you are an undergraduate and paying fees to attend a university, you own the software you produce. If you are a graduate student being paid a stipend, on the other hand, the university owns what you produce.
- If you a graduate student then you, your supervisor, and your university all have a right to what you produce.
The answer is, "It depends where you are." Different schools have different rules, even if they are in the same legal jurisdiction (i.e., the same country, state, or province). In fact, some universities' rules depend not only on who you are but on which faculty you are in.
The rules in industry are less complex—anything you do on company time or with company resources belongs to the company—but there are many gray areas. For example, I wrote some of the first drafts of this book on a company laptop while traveling for work. Does that mean I owe my former employer a share of the royalties?
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Creative Commons Licenses
The MIT license, the GPL, and the Hippocratic License are intended for use with software. When it comes to data and reports, the most widely used family of licenses are those produced by Creative Commons. These have been written and checked by lawyers and are well understood by the community.
The most liberal option is referred to as CC0 where the "0" stands for "zero restrictions". This puts work in the public domain, i.e., allows anyone who wants to use it to do so however they want with no restrictions. CC0 is usually the best choice for data, since it simplifies aggregate analysis involving datasets from different sources.
The next step up is the Creative Commons--Attribution license, usually referred to as CC-BY. This allows people to do whatever they want to with the work as long as they cite the original source. This is the best license to use for papers and report, since you want people to share them widely but also want to get credit for your work.
Other Creative Commons licenses incorporate various restrictions, and are usually referred two using the two-letter abbreviations listed below:
- NC (no commercial use) does not mean that people cannot charge money for something that includes our work, though some publishers still try to imply that in order to scare people away from open licensing. Instead, the NC clause means that people cannot charge for something that uses our work without our explicit permission, which we can give under whatever terms we want. (We use the CC-BY-NC license for this work.)
- ND (no derivative works) prevents people from creating modified versions of our work. Unfortunately, this also inhibits translation and reformatting.
- SA (share-alike) requires people to share work that incorporates ours on the same terms that we used. Again, it is fine in principle but in practice makes aggregation and recombination difficult.
Why be open?
[Hippel2006] reports that 85% of all interesting innovations in all industries come not from the suppliers but from the users. The more open work is, the better able users are to tinker with it and do things that the first contributors would never have thought of trying.