Authors and inventors need to be able to benefit from their work
Using something that you don't have the rights to use is illegal
The RIIA (Recording industry), software publishers (e.g. Microsoft), etc, all claim that use of their products without payment is a crime
Property is protected by two means: copyright and patent
Copyright was invented in the UK about 1660 in order
to protect the rights of
Copyright is nearly always assigned by the author to the publisher as part of the publication contract
Authors have "the moral right to be recognised as the author" while publishers have the legal right to sue those who break copyright
The original copyright period (1710) was 14 years, extensible to 28 years; The US increased this to 42 years, then 56 years, then 75 years and - when the copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire - to 90 years
When the US first enacted a copyright law, it excluded English works, so that English publications could be "borrowed" while US ones were protected
Copyright protects "works of art" which has been extended from books to music to computer source code and even binary computer code
Copyright protects works of art, patent protects ideas
You can't copy a copyright document, but you can implement any patented idea - as long as you pay money to the patent holder
Patent law first started in 1474 and protected ideas for 10 years; the current period is typically 20 years
The original idea of patent protection was to give the inventor enough time to make a profit from the idea
After that the idea would enter the public domain i.e. anyone can use the idea for free
Patents have been extended to cover things like DNA and genetically engineered bacteria
A typical copyright statement forbids you from doing lots of things. Some generous ones are:
"Individual articles in this journal are copyrighted by the APS, as indicated on each article. Individual articles may be downloaded for personal use; users are forbidden to reproduce, republish, redistribute, or resell any materials from this journal in either machine-readable form or any other form without permission of the APS or payment of the appropriate royalty for reuse." (http://prl.aps.org/info/copyright.html)
"Except as otherwise expressly permitted under copyright law or Cardiff University's Terms of Use, the content of this site may not be copied, reproduced, republished, downloaded, posted, broadcast or transmitted in any way without first obtaining Cardiff University's written permission or that of the copyright owner." (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/legals/copyright/index.html)
The open source movement rejects most of these restrictions and enforces removal of them
An open source license says you can do this, etc
The first part of the BSD license says: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted..."
Part of the GPL license says "...the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users..."
All open source licenses retain copyright in the work
If you copy or change a document, you can add to the copyright, but you cannot take away any existing copyright
The BSD license says that you can do whatever you want with changes you make
The GNU GPL license says that if you use GPL code in your code, then you have to make your code publically available.
The GNU LGPL says that you can use the code without having to make your own code public, but if you make changes to just to the code itself, then you have to make those changes public
You can compile it and sell the compiled code (or give it away)
You can change it and sell the compiled code (or give it away)
You can sell support for the code (or give it away)
You can sell books based on the code (or give it away)
You must make the source available for free
Most open licenses are for software: GPL, BSD, Apache, Mozilla, Eclipse, MIT, Artistic, ...
The Creative Commons licenses are for books, music, art, ...
They also grant rights rather than restricting
See e.g. Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Patents are amazingly open-ended and obscure, and often cover "obvious" technologies e.g. "one-click shopping" is patented by Amazon as "A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet."
The Open Patent movement wants to place patents in the public domain like open source licenses
After Microsoft sued TomTom for using the Linux implementation of their "long file names" hack, there are suggestions to place all of the Linux algorithms under an open patent license
The GIF image format was patented by Unisys in 1987. In 1994 they announced that they would collect license fees from anyone creating GIF images. The open source community responded by creating the PNG formats which are "unencumbered" (free from patent restrictions)
Many parts of the MP3 encoding algorithms are patented by the Fraunhofer Society. They made 100 million euros in 2005 (Wikipedia). The Ogg-Vorbis formats were developed in response and are free to use
In 1994 Apple sued Microsoft alleging copyright infringement on its GUI. Xerox in turn sued Apple for infringement on its GUI. Xerox lost as their claim was too old; Apple lost as they had already licensed their GUI to M/S
In July 2009 Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay to the RIAA US$675,000 dollars for downloading 30 copyrighted songs
Microsoft contributed 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux community. Cynics suspect that they did so to avoid being sued for GPL violations
Most licenses restrict access
Open licenses grant permissions
You can give things away and still make money