0.5 Creative approaches and alternatives

Module 6: creative approaches and alternatives

Learning objective

Traditional rights management often involves an exclusive assignment of all of the rights associated with a copyright from the author to a publisher. The publisher then makes copies and distributes the work to the public for a fee.

By contrast,  free, libre  and  open access  models disseminate works at no cost to the user. This module describes these alternative approaches, focusing on Creative Commons licensing and Open Access policy for scientific publications.

Case study

Angela writes Nadia the following email: “A professor at our university is the author of one of the articles I want to include in the course pack. However, when I contacted him to request his permission, he answered that he had already transferred all his rights to a publisher and thus wasn’t able to allow me to copy his work. How can it be possible that someone can’t even authorize use of his own work? What could be done to avoid this situation in the future?”

How should Nadia respond?

Lesson

Introduction: physical and digital commons

Physical objects are often  scarce  and  rivalrous .  This means that there are a limited number of such objects, and using one decreases the total amount that can be consumed. For example, an apple can be eaten by only one person, and when it is eaten, fewer apples are available to be consumed by other people.

By contrast, the intellectual products governed by copyright law typically are  nonrivalrous . A novel, for example, may be read and enjoyed by an unlimited number of people.

Digital technology has sharply reduced the cost of making copies of embodiments of intellectual products and thus has highlighted the nonrivalrous character of those products. If the novel (to continue our example) is in an electronic format, an unlimited number of copies of it can be made and distributed very cheaply.

The wide distribution of intellectual products is socially beneficial. If that widespread distribution can be accomplished very inexpensively, why doesn't the law permit it? As we saw in  Module 1 , the conventional answer is that prohibitions on copying are necessary to preserve incentives for novelists to write novels in the first instance.

In a growing number of contexts, reformers are challenging that answer. Authors of some works -- or some kinds of works -- may not need all of the rights that copyright law gives them in order to remain motivated to produce creative works. In such settings, copyright law may do more harm than good. To deal with situations of this sort, the reformers have developed various systems to facilitate more widespread use of creative works than the copyright system contemplates. This module describes those systems.