Copyright Crash Course

We've established that there is usually no copyright to protect when talking about data. In those instances where there could be some copyright, we recommend you use a CC0 license waiver when sharing data. This is also known as a public domain designation and does not make any copyright assertions. There are a few reasons for this.

• It can be difficult for a user to understand where creative content begins and ends and therefore difficult to know what can be reused. 
• Also, consider that people may be compiling data from multiple sources. If all data had different reuse licenses, then figuring how the information could be reused would also be very difficult. 
• While citation for CC0 is not legally required, it is generally good practice in academia that has been sustained for decades without a legal apparatus. It's likely that downstream users of your data will cite you, even if they aren't legally required to do so.

Software development has a long history of collaboration and sharing of code. If you've written software that you would like others to use, then there are many license options for you to choose from. These licenses are focused on keeping the source code open for all users and include copyleft or permissive licenses. Permissive licenses allow for commercial reuse, whereas copyleft works require that derivative works are released under an open source license (possibly the same as the original).

Here are some of the most popular open source licenses:

• MIT License (permissive)
  • This license allows users to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the software provided they include a copyright notice (Year, Copyright Holder) and the license text with their use. Full information available at link.
• BSD License (permissive)
  • This license allows users to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the software provided they include a copyright notice (Year, Copyright Holder) and the license text with their use. It differs from the MIT license only slightly with respect to endorsement and promotion of derivatives of a software. Full information available at link.
• GNU General Public License (copyleft)
  • This license allows you to copy, distribute, and/or modify the software provided that you include the copyright notice and license text, and mark any modified versions as changed. Full information available at link.

You should NOT use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to facilitate reuse of software. CC licenses do not contain text about distribution of source code and they do not address patent rights. In addition, CC licenses are not compatible with the main open source licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC licensed work with other free software.

The UT Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO) provides a wide range of services around open source software for university members and has a best practices document on open source software licensing. Researchers who are interested in patenting software commercialization should contact the Discovery to Impact office.

Many research projects may involve both data and software that researchers are expected to share by a journal or funder. If you want to license one or both of these outputs, they should be published as separate deposits in your repository or repositories of choice (i.e. should have separate DOIs) - it is not possible to mix licenses for a single deposit in standard repositories (e.g., Zenodo), and applying a license to an object that it should not apply to (e.g., a software license to a set of data files) creates confusion for potential users. The only instance in which data and software can be published under the same “license” is when the CC0 license waiver is used, since this asserts no copyright claim. Note that while CC0 is technically not incompatible with software, it is discouraged for use by the Open Source Initiative (OSI); Free Software Foundation (FSF); and The Fedora Project and can impede reuse of software released with this designation. Therefore, joint publishing of data and software under CC0 should only be done if the reusability of a set of materials will be severely adversely affected by separating them into linked deposits.