Research On Open Copyright License Agreement

Any intellectual creation of people, both technological invention and artistic expression, are some kind of information that people could know and perceive. The creation and utilization of information are based on the development of copy and transmission technologies. When the technology developed to a certain stage, some relevant markets of information generated. For encouraging the copy and transmission of information, people created a special protection system to authorize monopoly right similar to property rights, which was called copyright given to creators and transmitters of information. With the development of technology, the newer, quicker and more convenient copy and transmission technologies have been exploited continuously. At the present information age, most of the information’s creating, spreading, utilizing and recreating happen instantaneously online. However, people have been used to the traditional license system which is ‘getting authorization before utilizing’. Apart from a few copyright exceptions, using an authors’ works without authorization may constitute copyright infringement and therefore it brings legal obstacles to the updating and sharing of massive information in the digital environments, especially leads to the public cultural organizations’(such as libraries) function of information storage and transmission difficultly to meet the needs of the public. Thus the Open Access Movement, with its goal of making more knowledge accessible to the public through Internet, came into being.Information is free, but the freedom is not free. The agreements on open copyright licenses are outcomes of conflicts and compromises between the freedom of information and the monopolization of copyright. The agreements on open copyright licenses do not intent to overturn or replace the existing copyright system, but to break the ‘ending here’ rule of copyright encourage the freedom of information, promote the utilization of freedom of information by the public, on the basis of copyright law and respect to the author’s preserved rights. Comparing with the traditional copyright licensing system, the agreement on open copyright license is a kind of new licensing mode changing from ‘reserving all rights’ to ‘retaining part rights’.This paper firstly studies the relationship between the agreements on open copyright licenses and copyright law and other basic theory issues. Then it summarizes the common kinds of agreements on open copyright licenses, analyzes essential factors of copyright, sums up problems of applications of agreements on open copyright license of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Library in practice. The final conclusion is that the agreements on open copyright licenses can be parallel with existing copyright licensing system on the basis of respecting the authors’ free choice, which are contributable to the transmission of information and knowledge.