Copyright and software (2 minutes)

Creative works, like books, paintings and music, but also scientific articles and software, are covered by copyright. Copyright is a legal construct that gives the owner of the copyright on a work the exclusive right to reproduce, modify, publicly perform and distribute the work. As a result, anyone who is not the copyright holder needs to have permission from the copyright holder to also be able to do so.

Newly created works are automatically covered by copyright. This copyright is owned by the creator of the work, unless they were employed and created the work as part of their employment, in which case their employer owns the work. If multiple persons or organisations contribute to a work, then they each own a share of the copyright, and all need to give permission for others to be able to do any of the things protected by copyright. This permission is called a license.

Creative works can depend on each other. Books for example can be translated, or turned into a stage play or a TV series. This creates a new work, which is known as a derivative work. A derivative work has its own copyright, because creating a translation or adaptation is itself a creative process. Like in a collaborative work, both the owner of the original copyright and the owner of the copyright on the derived adaptation need to give permission to reproduce and distribute the derived work.

Software is a bit different from books or films or even databases because software is not only a collection of words and symbols, but also a machine that is used for something. As a result, working processes around software are quite different from those around books or films. Although it's bad practice, researchers quite often take a script from a colleague and modify it a bit so that it does what they want. A film director would be surprised indeed if you suggested they take a script from an existing film, change the dialog in the third act a bit, and then shoot it, but in software that's common. No novelist downloads ready-made paragraphs and chapters from the Internet and glues them together into a novel, but this is essentially how all modern software is developed.

As a result, software and copyright is a bit of a specialist topic, but one that cannot be avoided because of the automatic nature of copyright and the fact that science is a collaborative enterprise. Universities therefore need a policy to govern what their employees should do and can't do with respect to the software they develop and use, and that policy needs to include something specifically about licensing software.