Licenses and copyrights
In the introduction, we have already mentioned some aspects of copyright that relate to the digital environment and which are manifested in the form of licenses and piracy or patent litigation. At this point, we would like to emphasize the topic of openness, whether it is open source as a primary software phenomenon or some of its broader societal impacts.
In the introduction, it is necessary to say what copyright is and why we actually (don't) need something like that. If someone creates something - they write an article, make a course, or program an operating system, they create a digital artifact. It is a creative performance of the human mind, and there is a social usage that such an act should be protected. If people were not creating something, it would not be easy to appreciate - not socially, but above all economically - the one who came up with something. So more than creating and researching, it would be worthwhile to wait for someone else to think of it and use it.
This would lead to a certain paralysis of creativity, which would not pay off. Man would not make a living from creation, and it would be a better life strategy to proceed differently. Copyright protection is, therefore, a tool that should encourage innovation. From various analyzes of state innovation, it can be said that a correctly set (which does not mean draconian or extremely hard, but relatively clean, stable, and enforceable) environment supports and attracts innovation.
Copyright can then be divided into two large groups, i.e. personal and property. Personality is always associated with specific persons who are the authors of a given idea or artifact. In the Czech legal environment, this right cannot be waived and lasts forever. Homer is the author of the famous epic, and if someone publishes the exact text and presents it as their own (or as anonymous), they reduce Homer's copyrights. This is true although he is no longer alive.
Property copyright, on the other hand, is subject to sale. An author can sell a license for his book to a publisher, who can print and distribute it for the contract. The author can then (according to the agreement) get paid for such actions. Property copyright is therefore related to the right to dispose of the artifact and possibly use it economically. The price is always a matter of agreement. The work can also be distributed under a free license (for example, Creative Commons), which means a waiver of property rights.
Undoubtedly, it is interesting that although copyright and the choice of a license for it is a topic that must necessarily be encountered by anyone who uses or produces a work, relatively little attention is paid to it. At the same time, a basic overview and orientation in the issue are necessary if one wants to avoid various problems.
After all, the extremely short tenure of Ministers Taťána Malá and Petr Krčál in the second government of Andrej Babiš is an example of the fact that personal copyrights are worth respecting. If they had quoted adequately in their work, they would not have had to complete the first month of their work at the ministry. But we would also like to show that the issue has a broader and more critical social impact.
The book The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is considered a specific manifesto or theoretical grasp of code openness as a particular principle of thought. Still, it can be applied in any other human activity. Raymond works with a metaphor of two possible approaches to doing an activity.
The first is the metaphor of the cathedral - it is a professionally designed, well-thought-out, and clearly defined project. Neither the community nor the changes of the outside world have much influence on it. The critical reflection on which it is based is strong enough and tightened to withstand impacts. Development typically takes a relatively long time, and the final version is released only when it works safely and perfectly. According to him, this is an approach that is typical for large institutions to which they generate stable business models.
The second metaphor for how software can be created is a bazaar - it has only an essential purpose defined, but many loosely coordinated people are involved in its operation. Someone makes sure that something not belonging to the bazaar is not cheated or sold, but nothing more. A market without marketers doesn't make sense. The community is what determines it. At the same time, it is different every day and everyone who appears in it can change it significantly. Raymond writes that such a product is sensitive to the problems its users solve and its environment, in that it tries to respond to these problems with rapid and unstable, unplanned developments. A second-hand product can hardly promise accurate features or a release date or have long-term plans. The bazaar is then standard for open source development.
Each actual project moves in the field bounded by these two nodes. If we want to create something, it is appropriate to determine in advance whether we like the solution of the cathedral or the bazaar. It is interesting that while it is relatively easy to go from the cathedral to the market square, the opposite development is challenging (and, in reality, also complicated by licenses and copyright).
Thus, the openness or closedness of code is not a technical matter that may not be of interest to the average user but a question of the fundamental structure of thinking about how a program should work and how the community around it should relate to it.
Raymond shows another essential feature in his essay. He opened his program and gradually became more and more a programmer of development than a programmer - people who used his tool and at the same time wanted him to be able to do something else joined the development. The openness of the code is therefore closely related to the community and its participation in development. In this context, it is possible, for example, to read other open concepts, such as an open curriculum - this is based on the idea that the individual actively creates his educational plan. They integrate individual already existing elements. An available syllabus then allows anyone to discuss what they will learn in a given course, etc.
Today, open-source is far from just a question of well-known programs such as Firefox, Inkscape, LibreOffice, or VLC and Moodle, but it has a much wider application. Open formats have a specific role that anyone can implement in their application or machine without paying for a license—there are available movies, data, open hardware, etc.
Open source is not primarily a question of licenses (the best known of these are probably GNU - GPL, MIT, Apache, BSD, QPL, etc.), although these are essential for the accurate functioning of open digital artifacts. It is practical to have them well treated. The question is the willingness to invite the community to co-create the mental setting for the bazaar instead of the cathedral. But it is also important to emphasize that it is not easy to equate good software with an open solution and sinister corporation and proprietary software as evil. Both development models have their advantages and practical implications. Both generate projects, as well as low-quality and unnecessary ones.
While in programming, choosing a license that describes in detail what happens to the code and how to modify it and use it elsewhere is more common than in digital artifacts such as books, presentations, pictures, videos, etc. It seems practical for there to be a license which, on the one hand, protects the author (indirectly the whole of society) from being stolen or denied intellectual property while at the same time ensuring that it can be quickly disseminated and used.
The most well-known type of license is Creative Commons. These are licenses that consist of three layers - a full legal text, which formulates all the necessary principles of copyright protection, a brief text for the average user, and a machine-readable part. This technical detail is interesting in that it thinks of the user - he will use a legal environment and needs to get a good and straightforward overview of which license (or perhaps the version of Creative Commons)he wants to use. It's also important to remember the machines - Creative Commons is probably the only type of license that search engines can typically work with. If we want to get some free data, the easiest way to get to it is through this family of licenses.
This is not the only license but a vibrant structure of rights, making it relatively easy to say what should or should not happen to the work. Suppose a person answers some simple questions, such as the economic use of the work, the requirement to state the author or the preferred sharing model, and other benefits. In that case, one can choose the correct item from the list (for example, CC0 means that the object can be commercially used, modified, and shared without mention of the author) and apply it to your work. The default license in the legal system is Copyright, the form of an exclusive right.
The pages of the standard themselves directly emphasize that the fundamental purpose of the license is to support sharing and collaboration, the ability to remix content. This starting point is then reflected in the whole concept of the standard. The number of objects registered by the site under a Creative Commons license increases every year - from 140 million in 2006 to almost 1.5 billion in 2017. In other words, both openness as a particular value and thinking about licenses are becoming an increasingly important part of the public interest of producers and content managers.
If we look at the most critical platforms where Creative Commons is applied, in the first place is YouTube, followed by Wikipedia, Deviantart, Wikimedia Commons, Europeana, Vimeo, Internet Archive, DOAJ, Thingiverse, 500Px, and Medium. This list is interesting for its diversity as the type of content - from videos to blogs and scientific articles, from 3D models to digital libraries - also to the structure of operators, including commercial and non-commercial entities, scientific institutions, and lay producers. In other words, open licenses are not just a matter of some “pirate anarchist movement," as it might seem at first glance, but a practical and functional solution for much of the Internet.
Open Access is a concept of scientific communication, which assumes that permanent and free access to scientific information will be ensured. But when we talk about open access in general, we can mean many other topics, the most popular of which is the topic of open source and open-source software. It is likely that most people have at some point used tools such as VLC, LibreOffice, or Firefox. In addition, we may encounter open licensing for artifacts, hardware, or even movies. However, in this part of the specifics, we will be interested in scientific communication, i.e., most often under Open Access.
According to the places where the first three major conferences on this topic took place, the phenomenon of open access is associated with the so-called BBB initiative - with Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin. And it is from the first of them (from 2002) that the basic definition of what Open Access follows: “By open access to this literature we mean its free availability on the public Internet, which allows all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for or refer to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, transmit them as data to software or use them for other lawful purposes, without financial, legal or technical barriers.“
At this point, we should stop and look at what the statement is about. In the first place is the availability of literature. And not just so that we can “download" it somewhere, but such a way of working with it will allow further “extraction of information". In the current research, so-called secondary data analyzes are becoming popular, looking at new uses of information that someone has already gathered. Metastudies try to summarize what scientific knowledge knows in a specific area, even if not all texts may match at first glance.
At the same time, we must emphasize that self-access to information is not self-evident. Although pirated servers such as Libgen or Scihub allow access to some professional publications free of charge, there is a significant ethical issue, but generally related to accessibility; is the information available to everyone equally? The money involved in accessing professional articles (often around $ 30 for paper from which we know only an abstract or the need to pay expensive institutional subscriptions) proves to be a vital publication barrier - whether for academics from less developed regions or for beginning scientists and students. This information is essentially inaccessible to people outside academia. It seems that only a small group of academics from wealthy universities can run science, which is such a large and structurally demanding problem for science.
Therefore, the Open Access movement seeks to ensure at the literature level both the possibility of working with articles using various software tools, which can be mainly used for quantitative research, and the easy availability of information, which is crucial for the development of science. If we look at actively involved in this initiative, it is primarily libraries, as mediators of communication. This phenomenon shows that they are not afraid that “everything will be available on the Internet". When working with electronic information sources, they can offer a diverse range of services and tools.
The second group, which is very active in open access, is the researchers themselves. Open access would allow a better and easier way to access the necessary resources for their work. We can also see strong support from large grant providers, such as the European Commission or the Technology Agency in the Czech Republic. Gradually, publications outside the open-access regime will not be recognized as outputs in grant schemes, which should significantly help this area.
Looking at those against Open Access, we see publishers in particular, for whom it often means looking for new and more demanding models of magazine financing, which is difficult and unpleasant for many of them. Paying to read an article or for a subscription is the easiest option. At the same time, it will be better than before to see what is published in magazines, which not everyone may like—both publishers and academics with low-quality texts in closed journals.
There are several ways to achieve an open approach. In general, Open Access is a legitimate requirement of the scientific community, but there is no clear consensus on how it should be achieved. In practice, therefore, there is talk of the so-called color paths, of which we mention the three most common.
The greenway is that the author himself saves his result somewhere and publishes it, i.e. that we transfer the responsibility for open access to the author. This is advantageous because it is possible to work with it individually and achieve good results relatively quickly, but it lacks the dimension of systematization or completeness. It is often implemented by uploading texts to the author’s page or academic social networks - today mainly Academia.edu or Researchgate. This creates a more expansive space for searching, discussing, and sharing such content. But there are also institutional or public repositories. In practice, this path is sometimes complicated by magazine licensing rules.
The Golden Way is probably the preferred variant of the open approach, where openness is a concern of the magazine. The aim is that, ideally, all texts published in a specific journal are published without undue delay, permanently and free of charge. But this also brings with it certain pitfalls, especially where the magazines have to take funds for their operation. We come across those that do not collect any fees and magazines that expect authors to pay them, often not entirely small amounts. Such an approach can be problematic, especially for younger authors or authors in economically less developed countries.
The Hybrid path - some journals offer the possibility to publish an article under Open Access for a fee, but most texts are in the normally closed publishing model. Publishing in a closed way is either not paid at all or significantly less.
