By default, documents distributed on the Internet are subject to intellectual property law (attribution, short quotations allowed but no reuse without authorisation). A licence protects the author’s moral rights by systematically imposing the obligation to attribute the work by citing its source. It establishes the conditions for using a document: rights for using and modifying it (for example an image or translation), rights for commercial and non-commercial reuse, and any obligations such as mentioning the data source or sharing data in identical form (depending on the licence). Only the author, as copyright holder, can define and impose a distribution licence for their work. If there are several authors, and if one wishes to distribute the work, they must obtain their co-authors’ written authorisation.
There are several types of licence including:
The most frequently used licences for free dissemination are Creative Commons (or CC) licences. There are 6 CC licences allowing the rights-holder to attribute user rights following a sliding scale.
For research data, the CC0 licence, resulting from the Science commons project on scientific data, enables data producers to place it in the public domain without any restriction on usage. Data may be freely reused, improved, and altered, including for commercial purposes, without any obligation to cite the producer of the dataset or re-distribute it under the same licence.