Copyright and Open Licensing

Copyright law varies from country to country, so we advise you to check your national legislation to see what works are protected by copyright, what rights you have as an author, and how long the copyright lasts.

Common copyright provisions are:

• An author's work is an original intellectual creation from the literary, scientific, or artistic field that has an individual character, regardless of the method, form and type of expression.

• The author owns the copyright on his author's work by the very act of creating the author's work.

• Copyright includes the moral and property rights of the author.

• The author has the right to determine if, when, where, how and under what conditions his author's work will be published for the first time.

• The author has the exclusive right to do what he wants with his author's work and the benefits from it, and to exclude everyone else from it, if the Law on Copyright does not stipulate otherwise. This right includes:

· the right of reproduction

· right to distribute (right to market),

· the right to communicate the author's work to the public

· the right of processing.

• The author can establish the right to exploit the author's work for another or leave the realization of the copyright to him by contract, by granting approval or permission for use or by other legal act.

• The copyright holder can license or establish the right to exploit his work in whole or in part.

Creative Commons is a system of granting permission for the use of a certain author's work without royalties, which, in internationally accepted frameworks, simply by marking the variant of the Creative Commons license (i.e. permission to use the work), defines in detail the conditions under which the work is allowed to be used, without any other agreement or writing terms of use, since all terms are predefined in each variant of the Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons legal tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. They are designed to forge a balance inside the traditional "all rights reserved" setting that copyright law creates. Using a CC license makes it easy for others to use your work without any administration on your side. In other words, you don’t have to provide permission for each use.

There are six different Creative Commons licenses, as well as one public domain dedication tool.

Only the original author of the work or another lawful right holder may license and mark the work with a Creative Commons license.

Copyright must exist in the work being licensed. You must be the copyright owner of the work to place a CC license on it. If you’ve assigned the copyright to someone else, then you're no longer its copyright owner.

Creative Commons licenses can be applied to all work falling under copyright, including books, articles, photographs, presentations, movies, music, datasets, blogs, and websites.

There are six main license types you can use to specify what people are allowed to do with your work, listed from most to least permissive here:

Before you apply a CC license or CC0 to your work, there are some important things to consider:

The licenses and CC0 cannot be revoked. This means once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright, even if you later stop distributing it.

You must own or control copyright in the work. Only the copyright holder or someone with express permission from the copyright holder can apply a CC license or CC0 to a copyrighted work. If you created a work in the scope of your job, you may not be the holder of the copyright.

There are a number of things you should consider before you apply a Creative Commons license to your work, or before using Creative Commons-licenced material.

Considerations for Licensors - If you are licensing your own work

Considerations for Licensees - someone else's licensed work

The Creative Commons website has a helpful page that gives information about the different licenses and walks you through the selection process. At the chooser, simply answer a few questions, fill in the fields you need, and receive an already formatted HTML code.

Creative Commons Choose a License

Creative Commons License Chooser – New!

CC-licensing your work is simple. All you have to do is choose the CC license that suits your needs and then communicate this choice in a way that will be clear to people who come across your work. As part of this communication, you should include a link to the license you’ve chosen.

This can be as simple as a bit of text stating and linking to the license in a copyright notice, like this:

© 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.

…or as complex as embedding the license information on your website using the HTML code associated with the particular license. Use the Creative Commons License Chooser to get the relevant HTML code.

• On the author's work (printed or electronic - at the beginning of the document with the imprint) - it should be clear under what conditions it can be used and in what ways

• The generated image of the license and the text (the work provided for use under the license <license name>) are placed