Academic Programs and the GPL

[Adcadet]

hey crew,
I'm working on a project to help teach particular medical skills. The product will be largely HTML-based and distributed on CD and online (most likely), is considered an academic work (AFAICT), includes academic materials that have been copyrighted by publishers (scholarly medical journals) and could potentially be very widely distributed (think every teaching hospital in the US). My boss and I want to encourage collaboration, feedback, improvement, etc, and we don't want a private company taking it and making a commercial product out of it (unless we decide so). Does anybody know if this product is something that is GNU GPL-able, and should it be? As it is an academic work, do "regular" copyright laws suffice?

 

[CougTek]

We'll need a lawyer to answer this.

Don't look at me. Me and laws are two very distant things.

 

[Tea]

Quite possibly, Adcadet. Well, not the GPL, the one you want (if you use a GNU derived licence at all) is the GNU Free Documentation License. Alternatively, you might do well to consider one of the several Creative Commons licences. More on these shortly.

Your project includes copyrighted portions: I assume that these will remain under their original copyright and that you have the appropriate permissions. Your consideration of the GFDL, I assume, is to cover the balance of the work.

Now, I'll paste in some stuff I wrote elsewhere and seems to be appropriate.

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The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. The project provides a range of free licenses for copyright holders to use. Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The various Creative Commons licences allow copyright holders to grant some rights to the public while retaining other rights. For example, a work may be licenced only for noncommercial purposes, or only provided that it is reproduced verbatim and not in the form of a derivative copy.

http://www.creativecommons.org

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The GNU Free Documentation License is published by the Free Software Foundation http://www.fsf.org to provide a general method for making a document free, and to require that all modified and extended versions of the document are also free.

The GFDL was developed to overcome a difficulty with the traditional way of making creative works free for all to use: placing them in the public domain. People can share a publc domain work and their improvements to it if they wish. But an uncooperative person can make a few changes to a public domain work and then distribute the result as a proprietary product. If you receive the work in that modified form, then you no longer have the freedom that the original author intended: the middleman has stripped it away. Unless you can find a version of the work that has not been modified by the middleman, you can no longer freely use it, copy it, or give it away.

Essentially, the GFDL exists to ensure that anyone who redistributes the work, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. It has become common to term the function of the GFDL and other similar licences copyleft: similar to copyright but acting in the other direction — acting to encourage rather than restrict distribution and improvement of the work.

If you import material from an outside source which is GFDL licenced, then the resulting document is also covered by the GDFL (no matter how much or how little you modify it). You must add a note to your document stating that it is GFDL licenced, and linking back to the place you copied it from.

 

[Tea]

Which licence? All depends on what you want to do. Let's try to rough out some pros and cons for a few.

GFDL a little draconian in places. Mixing GDFL and copyrighted material could be tricky - you would have to be very clear in the way you delineate the different sections. (This applies to the others also, but not always to the same extent. Some of the CC licences allow you quite a bit of extra flexibility.)

The key issue with the GFDL, as I see it, is twofold. It provides absolutely no bar to commercial redistribution of your work, and it provides absolutely no control over the distribution of modified versions of your work. Maybe these things are OK for you, maybe not. But you have to consider the worst case scenarios.

* (a) A company comes along and starts selling your product for their own commercial gain. Provided they comply with the terms of the licence (which essentially amounts to saying "Adcadet wrote this and it is available under the GFDL") they can sell it any way they like, in modifed, improved, butchered, or mutilated form. You have no come-back. They cannot claim any copyright on it, however, not even if they add a whole stack of changes and tweaks. Once it is GFDL, it's GDFL. (Note that this is different to a public domain work. I could take a Dickens novel, cross out every 17th word and write in "bumfluff", and then claim copyright on the whole damn thing. You then cannot redistribute the novel without my permission, unless you can find an unmodified version to serve as your starting point.)

* Someone produces a complele bastardisation of the work, starts with your (excellent) product, and hacks it about until it is an essay in favour or recreational Jew-bashing, or abortion law reform, or a long work designed to show that smoking 40 a day is good for your health. You have no come-back. They can do any of those things, and provided that they still say "Adcadet wrote some of this and it's GDFL", you can't touch them. In fact, thy have to say "Adcadet wrote this", even if you would far rather they never mentioned your name!

Extreme examples, but you have to think these things through.

 

[Tea]

Note: as the copyright holder, you can always waive your rights if you want to - i.e., you can licence a work "non-commercial" but then turn around and sign a contract with a particular commercial publisher if you trust them and you want to do that.

The way licences work is that you (the creator of the work) always hold all possible rights to your own work: to permit or deny as you see fit. You still hold these rights even if you have licenced the work under (e.g.) the GFDL.

I'll give you an example. I wrote a short essay about an Australian explorer the other week, and posted it on Wikinfo (a wiki that uses the GDFL). By posting it there, I automatically licenced it to the entire world under the GFDL. Anyone can copy and modify that essay of mine, can print it out and sell it for any price they want, but they must link back to Wikinfo (the place they got it from).

A few weeks later, I took that same essay and posted it on Wikipedia (a different wiki), and did not link to the original site. Why not? Because I wrote it, and therefore I still hold the copyright. I can do anything I want with it (including sell it to Playboy, if I so please). If you did that, I could sue you for breaking the copyright. But, of course, if you took the GFDL copy on Wikinfo and posted that one, complete with the appropriate GFDL statement and a link back to Wikinfo, that is perfectly legal.

If I modify my essay to improve it, the entire text complete with modifications is copyright me. You can't copy it without my permission. But if you modify my essay, then the modified text is automatically GDFL - because the GDFL is the only licence under which I have made that text available.

Make sense?

Hmmm .... reading it over, not much. Let's try again.

There are two ways to licence a creative work.

* (1) Exclusive. You are the editor of Playboy. I write an essay and you buy it. It is part of the contract that we sign that I abandon all rights to the work - i.e., that I sell you the right to print the work next to the August Centrefold and I also sell you my right to sell my rights. Why do I do this? Because if I don't sign that standard contract your lawyer prepared, you won't hand over the money! So now I can't turn around sell the same essay to Penthouse or the New York Times. I have sold you exclusive rights to it, and you now own it lock, stock and barrel. If I print out a copy and give it to Mercutio, you can sue me for breaking your copyright!

* (2) Non-exclusive. I sell you certain rights (such as the right to print 10,000 copies of my essay), but not my right to sell my rights (or give them away - in this context it's the same thing). I can still sell it to Penthouse too (though the reality is that neither magazine is likely to buy if they can't have an exclusive). And I can then turn around and offer it free of charge to the Michigan Historical Society Newsletter, just because they are nice people and I want to.

Open licences such as the Creative Commons ones and the GFDL are always non-exclusive. As the copyright holder, you are always free to (say) bring out a second edition which is not under te GFDL or CC licence, or under a different licence.

Also, as the copyright holder, you are always free to relax the provisions if you want to. You could, if you wanted to, place the second edition in the public domain.


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Creative Commons

The various Creative Commons licences give you more choice. Think of them as being much the same as the GDFL but with a variety of "holdout clauses". For example:

* The CC attribution non-commercial share-alike licence. More or less the same as the GFDL, but commercial use is explicitly forbidden. (Unless the publisher contacts you and asks permission, of course. This, BTW, might be a good time to ask for money!) The "share-alike" provision means that anyone can modify the work, but only if they then licence the modified work under the exact same terms. (The GFDL is the same in this regard.)

* The CC attribution no-derivitaves licence. More or less the same as the GFDL, but modifications are explicitly forbidden. (I use this for quite a few of my photographs: I'm happy for people to reprduce them and share them, but I'm damned if I'll put up with them butchering my pictures. Use it as-is, or go without.)

* Lots more variations. But you get the idea.

I recommend you take a good look at the various Creative Commons licences, Adcadet. More than likely, you will find a suitable licence ready-made.

 

[sechs]

The GPL doesn't really cover copyrights; it's concerned with licenses.

Anything that you create is automatically copyrighted to you. To enforce your copyrights, it's highly encouraged to register them. Nearly all GPLed software is copyrighted to the creator.

If you wish to use copyrighted materials in a new work, you may need to get a license or permission. Since this sounds to be purely academic in both source and use, this may simply be a matter of asking the appropriate people and pushing paperwork.

If you want to license others to use your work, you can use the GPL. But you will necessarily lose control of future changes, such that any licensee can create and distribute their own version of the work. Depending on your goals, you may wish to maintain central control of revisions of the work.