Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/104



Open licensing

Among the arguments surrounding open access in the humanities that have caused controversy, few have been so ﬁerce as those concerning open licensing.1 Sceptics believe that liberal reuse rights will fuel an epidemic of plagiarism-like practices, will allow commercial re-enclosure of academic work and will fundamentally violate the moral rights of the academic author. Proponents, conversely, have cited the technological and social advances that could be made with the possibility of reusing material. In this chapter I explore these claims from both sides in order to ascertain the risks and the beneﬁts of open licensing provisions but also to give some pragmatic information about the licenses under discussion.

Picking up where Chapter 1 left off, ‘open licensing’ refers to conditions under which a copyright holder allows others to reuse material in ways that go beyond those speciﬁed within the fair use (or ‘fair dealing’) provisions of copyright law. Open and free licensing, like open access, has a history rooted in the free software movement. However, to truly get to grips with licensing, whether open or not, it is ﬁrst important to understand how these phenomena sit in relation to copyright. Licensing does not override, and its goal is not to abolish, copyright. Licensing, instead, depends upon the legal provisions of copyright.

Copyright law, in the UK, was introduced under the Statute of Anne in 1709, was cemented by the Copyright Act of 1911 and is currently implemented under the Copyright, Designs and Patents 86