What is IP licence? From A to Z

IP licence: Is it expected that content uploading to the Internet soon will be directly subject to automated applications that reveal the legality of the content before it is approved for publication?

This is what some expected after issuing the new IP license law passed by the European Parliament in April 2019, which obliges Internet giants such as Google and Facebook to monitor the content published through them and ensure that it does not infringe on IP license rights.

As for freelance work online, IP license rights issues raise questions about how freelancers can legally practice their freelance work, avoid their work being removed and protect freelancers and their clients from IP license infringement penalties imposed by Google, Facebook, and others; For example, suspending or completely deleting the violator’s account.

In this article, we will help you as a freelancer know some of the concepts associated with IP licence rights and the controls for your use of materials that have IP license rights on the Internet. First, let us learn about the concept of IP license rights and what it means to infringe them?

IP licence

IP license rights are a set of particular, exclusive rights to protect the works of authors and creators from reproducing and exploiting their work by others without their consent.

IP license rights cover a broad spectrum of creative work, such as articles, books, literary works, photographs, paintings, sculptures, films, audio materials, software, architectural designs, and product designs.

Violating intellectual property rights means infringing on these rights by using the creative in any way without a license from its owners, for example, using images that you are not authorized to use, translating an article for which you do not have permission to translate, or creating a video with an audio file that is not licensed To reuse, as well as to assign the freelancer to himself a work he does not perform, which is a flagrant violation of others and threatens the future of the freelancer professional as we shall see.

What is a license to use, and what are its types?

IP licence

IP licence

IP licence to use is when the author permits others to use his works according to the conditions he sets. Use licenses are divided into three types:

“All rights reserved (©)”: which means that all materials on the site are not allowed to be used in any way without the permission of their owners.

Public domain CC0 (Public Domain): This gives complete freedom to use the material without mentioning the source. For example, old paintings that are more than 70 years old after the death of their creator fall under this type of license.

Creative Commons CC: This is a license developed to facilitate the use of some materials on the Internet that their owners accept to reuse and grants owners of materials the right to specify the terms of reuse. The CC license is characterized by the ease of identifying the terms of use through standardized global symbols without communicating with the owner of the material to obtain his consent.

There are four types of this license:

  1. Attribution (CC BY): This allows unrestricted reuse concerning the employer.
  2. Non-Commercial (CC NC): This allows reuse provided that the use is not used for commercial purposes, meaning that the service does not profit.
  3. Prevention of Derivatives (CC ND): This allows the material to be reused without modification, development, or derivation from it.
  4. License Alike (CC SA): This allows the material to be reused provided the resulting new material is licensed on the same terms as the original material.

Examples of widespread IP licence disputes

Since the concept of IP licence rights emerged in the early eighteenth century until now, many judicial disputes have arisen over IP license, and the following are examples of some intellectual property cases that have gained wide fame and fame:

 “Trademark is registered” This is a common phrase with which some think that IP licence rights require registration with a competent official body or something like that. However, this belief is wrong. IP licence rights are like other inherent rights that do not require any specific legal procedures to be acquired, for example, human rights acquired by a person upon birth and intellectual property rights owned by each author as soon as his work comes to light.

Therefore, all materials that you use in your freelance work, whether images, audio files, videos, software, articles or books, should be careful when dealing with them and make sure that you use them in a way that does not infringe the property rights of their creators.

How to properly use proprietary material

IP licence

IP licence

About IP licence, and as a freelancer, you have many options to carry out your work smoothly without falling into intellectual property rights problems. Below we present some opportunities for using both written text content, audio files, videos, and images for free and in a manner that respects intellectual property rights.

First: Written content such as articles and books

Translation: If you want to translate an article, you should contact the author of the paper and get his permission before starting the translation if all paper rights are reserved. If the article is licensed under a Creative Commons license, you can translate it without the author’s permission. If the article’s license does not prohibit derivation, the translation falls under the intellectual property rights category.

Citation: Citation falls under the principle of fair use, so you as a writer can quote a few lines of an article or book from any source you like without obligation to license or permission provided that you indicate the start of the citation.

Second: audio files

Many sites provide freely authorized audio materials; for example, Facebook provides an audio library for content creators with hundreds of audio files available for free use in creating videos published on Facebook and Instagram.

Third: the videos

You may be surprised that the videos are also among the materials available under a Creative Commons license, and you can use them for free without worry. Sites like Vimeo and Wikimedia Commons offer hundreds of videos licensed under a Creative Commons CC license.

Fourth: Pictures

Many sites allow you to download images for free, the most famous of which is Freepik, which contains hundreds of thousands of pictures authorized to be reused for all purposes. On the other hand, Pixabay offers images licensed under the CC0 Public Domain License, allowing easy reuse without acknowledging the image’s source.

Read More: What is a copyright license? – from A to Z