Why should I care about copyright?
One might say: “Unlike Stephanie, the outputs from my project don't include copyrighted songs, why should I care?” Or “I’ve published blog posts about my citizen science project, uploaded our data to Zenodo, and shared the source code of our mobile app on GitHub. I’m happy for others to make use of them, isn’t that enough?” Unfortunately, no.
Ideas in chains by Pen-Yuan Hsing, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Remember, copyright automatically restricts your work as soon as you create it. You can’t even refuse it! As we have seen from the case studies, it is a criminal offence to make copies of (let alone changes to) a work without a license from the copyright holder. If a teacher prints copies of your blog post for their students; someone downloads a copy of your data to analyse; or a developer tweaks your code to add improvements, those are all illegal by default. And as we learned from Stephanie, it is risky to rely on fair use rights. Even if you believe your unlicensed use is fair, someone else might disagree. For better or worse, everyone has to request a license for every single use of a copyrighted work.
Another way to think about this is when you’re preparing a presentation about your citizen science project. You’re the copyright holder of photos you took or text you wrote, but when you find material on the Internet to help spruce up your slides, do they come with clear licenses? If not, then you are technically committing copyright infringement, a major criminal offence. The threat of copyright litigation has a chilling effect on creativity in the arts and sciences, which is explored in the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig [1], a law professor at Harvard University.
While copyright technicalities might seem convoluted and tricky, fortunately, there are tools to help us make sharing, reusing, and remixing open science outputs very easy. We will cover this next.
References
1. Lessig, L., 2005. Free culture: The nature and future of creativity. Penguin Books.