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Module n. 2: Open Licensing and Copyright in Education
Eleonora Bassi & Pasquale Pellegrino
Politecnico di Torino – Nexa Center for Internet & Society
Open Education Training Week
25/29 September 2017, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
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Contents of module n. 2
• Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights
• Public Domain
• Free Software and Open License
• Creative Commons
• Open Science
• Open Access
• Open Data
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What are
Intellectual Property Rights?
Intellectual Property Rights refer to those legal rights aiming to
protect the creations of the intellect
“Copyright is one of the many IPRs and is a legal term used to
describe the rights that creators have over literary and artistic
works” (WIPO)
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Why the Copyright?
Copyright protection aim at giving the creator the rights to take
advantage of its creation either by economic or reputational means
Ø It differs among countries. There is not a unique legislation even though the
Berne Convention established some international standard: E.g. the concept that
a copyright exists the moment a work is "fixed", rather than requiring registration.
It also enforces a requirement that countries recognize copyrights held by the
citizens of all other parties to the convention
Ø It might not be exclusively owned by authors (e.g. Universities, publishers,
educators)
Ø Historically it has been justified as an incentive to stimulate innovation in a
context of scarcity
Ø It has a different duration based on legislations and sectors
Ø Copyright law protects only the form of expression of ideas, not the idea per se
Some key aspects of copyright protection
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The Public Domain
Intellectual Property Rights don’t last forever, indeed
at some point they expire...
So what happen to those creations and works that are
no more covered and protected under IPRs?
They enter the Public Domain
“The term public domain refers to creative materials that are not
protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or
patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or
artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining
permission, but no one can ever own it” (Stim 2010)
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Free software Licences and Open Licences
The digital era brought a re-ontologization of the space we live in,
furthermore it introduced a change in the way we produce, consume
and share information
Information
scarcity
to
Information
abundance
New instruments to deal with this new paradigm are needed
from
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Free So2ware Licenses:
Ø This licences have been introduced in the 80’s to promote free so8ware
development and distribu:on
Ø Free so8ware licences’ founding father is Richard Stallman, who wrote the first
version of GNU-GPL in 1989
Ø The main reason behind the crea:on of this licences has been the ease by
which they favoured the spreading of free so2ware
Open Licences:
Ø This kind of licences give the users many op<ons when using someone else’s
work
Ø They respond to the new context the digital era contributed to give rise to
Ø Indeed open licenses foster sharing, so they are more flexible legal
instruments that support informa<on and knowledge circula<on in the
internet
Ø Open Licenses could be associated with sw, data, databases, archives, images,
music, and other kind of crea:ve works
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Open Science
Open Science is a new paradigm based on the philosophical postulate of
‘openness’.
This paradigm elevates ‘openness’ as the primary mean to foster long
las<ng growth and innova<on for the whole society
Why is ‘Open Science’ a priority?
E.g. EU embraced Open Science new paradigm because its development has
been reinforced by recent calls for the global governance of science from
European Ins:tu:ons which considered the transi:on towards Open Science
a fundamental step to foster knowledge circula:on as a driver for faster and
wider innova:on