3.9 LET US SUM UP
Over the course of this unit, we emphasized authors’ right over the work created by them. Copyright laws provide legal authority to authors and rights holders to claim economic advantages from their works. However the unequal distribution of knowledge and access to information is a problem due to restrictions of the copyright regime. While the copyright laws provide fair dealing clause and licensing options, authors usually do not exercise their rights to apply appropriate licenses while signing copyright transfer form of the publishers. The emergence of the Creative Commons licenses has empowered the authors to use these to share their original works in suitable open licenses. We discussed the affordances of the six types of CC licenses that are in a continuum of openness – from more liberal remix possibilities in CC-BY to only read option in CC-BY-NC-ND. We also highlighted the Author Addenda option for the researchers to use while signing off copyright of their research publication.
USEFUL VIDEOS ON THE TOPIC
Lawrence Liang on Aaron Swartz as the first martyr of the free information movement, Video24
Professor Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons Licensing, Video25
Lawrence Liang on Copyright and CC licenses, Video26
Creative Commons Explanation, Video27
Larry Lessig: Laws that choke creativity, Video28