Section 3.9 Ethics & Code Ownership
We have all heard about movie and brand copyrights but what about code? If you write a piece of code, do you own it? In Canada and the US, an original work (including code) is automatically protected by copyright, from the moment you create it. This doesn’t make your idea protected, just your specific piece of work. If you want to protect the idea from being copied you need a patent. For example, you might remember the viral game, Flappy Bird. In fact, in 2014, there were 864 Flappy Bird clones in the Google Play store and none of them broke copyright. Copyright protects the author from someone replicating their code exactly but it does not protect the idea itself from being copied. However, imagine you work for a company and use Microsoft Word for your work. You want to finish from home but your own home computer doesn’t have Microsoft Word, so you make an extra copy of the software and install it at home so that you can finish. This is software copyright infringement.
Now imagine, since, you know that it is copyright infringement to duplicate Microsoft Word, you instead install LibreOffice. LibreOffice is an alternative to Microsoft Word software and this is copyright legal. How is this possible? Enter the idea of open-source software.
Open-source software is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder gives permission to users to use the software and to alter and distribute the software code. It’s not that a copyright doesn’t exist for the code but the copyright holder has specified an open-source license to allow for everyone to benefit from code.
There are many benefits to sharing code publicly and creating open-source work. These include:
Freedom and flexibility of open source code means developers are not waiting on licenses and understanding legalese in order to enhance and update software.
Open-source code is seen and critiqued by a global community of people. Developers are more likely to write better code when they know other experts will be looking at it.
Open-source code is exponentially cheaper. Open-source implies you do not need to pay to use the software (in most cases) and you not need to manage any sort of license.
The security issues that may arise with open-source code are often addressed by Linus Torvald’s “many eyes” theory: with many people examining the code, security issues are found and fixed more quickly. The theory has been proven to be true time and again when ethical and expert developers review open-source code to help enhance its security capabilities.
Open-source is often used to designate code and software being shared publicly, but there exist similar licenses for other resources, such as Creative Commons (CC) licenses. There are different types of CC licenses or General Public Licenses (GPL) that developers can designate for code they release, depending on how strictly they want to control how the code can be adapted/copied and used. Copyright and Intellectual Property rights can be a complex and intimidating topic, but it is important to understand. As developers, we are constantly building on other people’s code through the use of modules and creating new code that others may want to use.
Check your understanding
Checkpoint 3.9.1.
Open-source code …:
is free from copyright rules so I can use it however I want.
Open-source code is still copyrighted code, it is just licensed under special licenses dedicated to free use coding.
is copyrighted, but has a license that lets me use it for free and copy and extend it.
That’s right, there are special licenses that exist specifically for people who want to make their code open-source.
is only a thing for big companies so I don’t have to worry about it.
Big or small, many or singular, copyright and intellectual property affects us all
doesn’t affect me as a student but will when I graduate.
Even as a student the code you write yourself is your own. You are the copyright author, without even doing anything (in Canada). As soon as you made it, it became yours.
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