This weeks lecture covered intellectual property, copyright and copyleft (creative commons).
The well-known copyright symbol. (Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright, last modified 3/11/14, uploaded 5/11/14)
When we produce original work it is automatically covered by New Zealand’s copyright law. Here is the link to the website of IPONZ, the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand: http://www.iponz.govt.nz/cms/what-is-ip According to them Intellectual Property includes patents for new inventions, trademarks and copyright of written work,photos music and art. It is important to protect your IP if you are hoping to benefit from it commercially.
The less well-known copyleft symbol reversing the C. (Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft, last modified 4/11/14, uploaded 5/11/14)
If you are more concerned with the greater good but still want some control over your work you should look at the creative commons aka copyleft.
There are 4 licences elements and 6 different types of copyleft licensing each with its own unique symbol:
Licence Elements
Attribution – others must credit you as the creator of the work.
NonCommercial – others may not use your work for commercial purposes.
NoDerivatives – others may not change your work if they use it.
ShareAlike – people who adapt your work must use the same licence to enable sharing in the same way as you have.
These have been combined to make 6 licenses which can be applied to any work yu want covered by them. Here is an example of the most restrictive one,
the attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives licence:
The other licences can be seen on the following link:
http://creativecommons.org.nz/licences/licences-explained/ which is also the source of the above Element pictures.
GNU is the free LINUX operating system more correctly called the GNU/LINUX operating system sponsored by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). As they say on their website http://www.gnu.org/ that is free as in free speech not free as in free beer. It actually is an acronym that stands for Gnu’s Not Unix. Users of GNU/LINUX are free to run the software as well as change, copy, improve and distribute it. The software can be downloaded from their website.
GPL stands for General Public Licence and they have just released version 3 of it called GPLv3 and here is the link GPLv3. It basically gives a Copyleft licence to any user of their software.
When we have created our project we should apply one of these licenses to it unless we want the full copyright to apply in which case we should state that it is copyright to avoid any confusion in the future if it makes us a million dollars.
RES701Peter 