How does an open license work?

The Open Content licensing model is based on copyright law which says that the rights to a work are reserved by the copyright holder who is usually the author or creator of the work. An author or creator can of course sell the rights to their work in which case the buyer becomes the copyright holder. Open Content licenses—such as Creative Commons licenses—are an additional license that work on top of copyright. Authors and creators can add a Creative Commons license to their work in order to specify which rights they would like to make available to the public. Creative Commons has developed six types of licenses that allow copyright holders to grant rights under a range of conditions and obligations. CC licenses may, for example, oblige the licensee to credit the author anytime the work is used. In the language of the Creative Commons, this is called providing attribution and might be expressed as, “You are allowed to republish this work under the condition that you name the author.”

The open content model is sometimes falsely referred to as an anti-copyright approach. It is a model for rights holders to manage their copyright in a specific way. Open Content does not oppose copyright per se but allows a licenser to take a different approach to the traditional “all rights reserved” approach. Open Content licenses are tools that can be employed to serve both the individual interest of the author and the public interest. It is, however, for each copyright owner to decide whether open content licenses suit their personal needs.