Licenses

Licenses are a way to deal with copyright issues: Authors can grant users rights to use their work whilst retaining copyright. A license thus essentially provides other users the legal permission to perform certain acts that are otherwise restricted by copyright. It does not transfer any exclusive rights to the licensee; the rights stay with the licensor, the creator of the work.

  • If an exclusive license is granted, the author undertakes not to grant a license to the work to anyone else.
  • If the author grants the publisher only a simple license, they are entitled to grant further (simple) licenses to other persons or organisations.

Types of licenses

The following Creative Commons licenses should be considered:

License Condition Rights
Attribution You may reproduce, distribute, make publicly available, modify and commercially exploit the work.
Attribution
Share alike		 One may reproduce, distribute, make publicly available, modify and commercially exploit the work, but must share it under the same conditions.
Attribution
No derivatives		 One may reproduce, distribute, make publicly available and commercially exploit the work, but not modify it.
Attribution
Non-commercial		 One may reproduce, distribute, make publicly available and modify the work, but not use it commercially.
Attribution
Non-commercial
Share alike		 One may reproduce, distribute, make publicly available and modify the work, but not use it commercially, and must share it under the same conditions.
Attribution
Non-commercial
No derivatives		 One may reproduce, distribute and make the work publicly available, but not use it commercially or modify it.

Open Data Commons licenses

Open Data Commons Licenses are very similar to the Creative Commons Licenses but are specific to data (and can only be used to license data).

How to apply a license to your work

  1. First, determine the copyright. Only as the copyright owner can you license your work freely.
  2. Determine if you are using other works that are also licensed and restrict you in your choice of licenses (e.g. -SA- additions of CC licenses).
  3. Choose a CC license, e.g. with the License Chooser. If you want to share your data openly, choose an “open license”, e.g. CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.
  4. Write a short text on your work (e.g. on the title page or last slide). Make sure to include the name of the license and the link to the license text.
    For example: This work is licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Alternatively, you can:

  • save the license text in a separate text document (e.g. license.txt) and upload it with the dataset.
  • select a preset license in a repository when you upload your work.

Software

Software can also be protected by copyright. This covers both the executable and the source code, as well as the graphic interface. However, functionalities and ideas are not protected. For the licensing of software there are a lot of different licenses (e.g. MIT, GPL). The website “Choose a License” helps you to decide on a software license.

See also the information from CLARIN on licenses, including software:

Read more about open licenses

Resources