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 specifying the conditions under which the work may be reused and distributed, as can be seen on the copyright page of this book. Placing work under a Creative Commons license is an irrevocable act; one cannot rescind the rights one has bestowed on others after the fact.

It is important to reiterate, as above, that these licenses do not replace or abolish copyright because, without copyright, an author could not make any claim over the work, including the right to attribution. Furthermore, when the copyright term expires, the license will no longer hold any binding force; the material will enter the public domain. Indeed, the Creative Commons licenses ‘are, in fact, built on copyright and last for the same length of term as the copyright in the work’. The Creative Commons foundation believes that this gives a sense of freedom back to authors, noting that such licenses ‘enable you, as an author, to specify the conditions of re-use that best suit your needs, while ensuring that you are credited for your work’.13 As will be seen, others disagree with such an assessment and ﬁnd the rhetoric of ‘enabling’ reuse, couched in terms of ‘freedom’, to be misleading, particularly when funding agencies require that researchers apply such licenses to their work.

As noted in Chapter 1, these licenses – and particularly the clauses that allow modiﬁcation of work – derive from a history in computer science and open-source programming cultures. It is worth saying, however, that the contexts are slightly different, which may have a bearing upon the rationales for open licensing in the humanities as opposed to computer science. With a piece of computer software, there are usually two different aspects: the source code (which is text that can be read) and the compiled binary (which is the version that can be run). The process of authoring a program is (usually – there are exceptions) to write code (a series of instructions that tell the computer, sequentially, what to do) in a high-level language that resembles words and instructions familiar to speakers of the English language. These instructions are then fed to a ‘compiler’, which translates and optimises them into an object code (usually assembly or machine code), an extremely low-level format that is difﬁcult for people to understand, but easy and quick for machines to execute. The important point to note, however, is that it is extremely hard, albeit not impossible, to change the behaviour of the program or to understand its workings without the original source code. It is also