An introduction to open copyright and software licensing
This event took place on Thursday 18 January 2007 at 10:30

Richard McCracken Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University, United Kingdom

The presentation will cover copyright's position as one of the intellectual property rights and how it differs from other intellectual property rights. It will give an overview of what copyright protects as well as what may be done with copyright protected works without permission under permitted acts (sometimes or so-called exceptions). It is by manipulating the restricted acts through licensing arrangements that rights owners establish and exploit commercial markets. In contrast to commercial markets, the growth of open source and open content licensing models has challenged established business models. The presentation gives a brief commentary on two of the more prominent open licensing frameworks: the GNU Creative Commons licences.

Richard McCracken is Head of Intellectual Property at The Open University where he is responsible for managing the acquisition and exploitation of copyright and related rights in all media across all platforms: print, online, broadcast and multimedia. He speaks and writes widely on rights management, particularly on the management of rights as part of the production of educational materials.

We apologize that the first few minutes of this presentation are missing due to technical issues.