Open Content

The Open Content principle is based on the ideas of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. The Open Source approach was established in the software market in the 1990s, mainly resulting from the great success of GNU-Linux and its license, the GNU General Public License (GPL). Written in 1989, the GPL was the first free software license, which allowed users to use, study, share, and modify the software. Today, entire markets are based on the development, maintenance, customization, and marketing of Open Source Software. The inventors of the Open Content principle adopted the basic ideas of FOSS and applied them to other forms of creative contributions, such as music, films, or images.

The main protagonist of the Open Content movement was Lawrence Lessig, a legal scholar at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, USA. In 2001, he joined forces with Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred and founded the Creative Commons (CC) initiative to promote the digital commons. CC aimed to encourage and enable creators to open their works for general use without having to rely on costly and complex legal advice or having to donate their rights to the public domain. For this purpose, CC designed and published a variety of different licenses that are easy to handle by the licensers and easy to observe by the users. Also, the initiative offers useful information and several tools on its website, which can be used by anybody free of charge.

The underlying philosophy aside, Open Content is a licensing model that is based on copyright law. Copyright-protected works are made available to the public for, by, and large free and unhindered use. Being a licensing scheme, however, the Creative Commons licenses are not based on or lead to the public domain.1 On the contrary, they depend on effective copyright protection. Without copyright, the license could not be effective, especially not when it comes to the enforcement of the license obligations.2

Licensing means to grant a third party (anyone else except the right holder) the right to use a copyright-protected work. The license is, however, granted only under certain conditions and obligations on the user's side. Open Content licenses may, for example, oblige the licensee to credit the author with every use. This relation between right and obligation could be expressed as: “You are allowed to republish this work under the condition that you name the author.”

Open Content licenses are generally suitable for every kind of creative work. The CC licenses are generic licenses that can be used for music, films, texts, images, and any other aesthetic creation. However, they are not designated to license software. As technical products, computer programs require different license conditions. There are specific licenses available for software, such as the abovementioned Open Source licenses. Also, there are special licenses for other technical creations such as databases.3

Open Content is sometimes referred to as an anti-copyright approach. This is, however, not true. It is a model for right holders to manage their copyright in a specific way. Open Content does not oppose copyright per se but allows a licenser to take a different approach to the traditional “all rights reserved” approach. Open Content licenses are tools that can be employed to serve both: the individual interest of the author and the public interest. It is, however, for each copyright owner to decide whether Open Content licenses suit their personal needs.