You wouldn't dream of grabbing huge swaths of a book and passing it off as your own writing, but don't many (most?) beginning programmers copy material verbatim from books and articles into their own work?
As an author, I don't have a problem with this, but it seems like there's a double standard. I maintain a copyright on my writing, am paid for it, and I and/or my publisher would take action against someone who stole this work. Yet the code examples in my writing are meant to be taken and reused freely. It's not enough, IMHO, to describe the principles of some technique - if I think there's an ideal way to do something, I'll say "do it this way", and I would want a reader to take that code and use it verbatim.
After all, if readers aren't taking the material and applying it to their own work, then there's no point writing the article or book in the first place.
Aside from the double standard of treating an article as two separate entities from a copyright point-of-view (the jealously-defended prose versus the openly-offered code), there's also a question of what license works for the code. I had been putting GPL license statements on my QuickTime for Java code over on ONJava, and I've received requests to re-license it so it can be used commercial products, something I've always granted. Because the material is small and instructional in nature, my goal is not to get someone else to GPL their stuff, it's only to teach.
I went over to Creative Commons to look for a custom license. I said I didn't want any restrictions on sharing - it's OK to use in proprietary, closed systems, make modifications to the code, not attribute me, etc. According to CC, that means it's effectively public domain.
This, I think, is interesting. On the one hand, I feel I should maintain some copyright on the code - after all, I'm being paid for it, along with the article or book prose. But on the other hand, without an attribution requirement or any kind of restriction, does a copyright still exist? With no restriction on use, doesn't that effectively make it public domain?
And aside from all these theoretical questions... what kinds of license would you like to see on articles posted on java.net or in books by your favorite publishers? If there were, say, an attribution requirement, would you be unable or unwilling to use such material in your work?
--Chris (invalidname) |
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