MYP Design Intellectual Property, Copyright and Licensing Notes

Intellectual Property Is Four Rights

1. Intellectual property is the name for legal rights over things people create: writing, drawings, inventions, brand names and the shape of a product.
2. Four rights do nearly all the work: copyright, trademarks, patents and registered designs.
3. Each one guards a different part of a product, which is why a single object can be covered by all four at once.
   1. On a trainer, the advertising photo is copyright, the logo is a trademark, the cushioning mechanism may be patented and the sole pattern may be a registered design.
4. These rights are national, so something registered in one country is not automatically protected in the next one.
5. Infringing means using what somebody else owns without permission, and for a student the usual cost is work taken down or marks withheld for academic dishonesty.

Copyright: Automatic, Free and Very Long

1. Copyright exists the moment an original work is fixed in a form someone else could see or hear, with no form to fill in and no fee to pay.
2. It covers text, photographs, drawings, music, film and the source code of a program.
3. It protects the expression rather than the idea, so nobody can stop you designing a folding stool, only copying their drawing of one.
4. In most countries it runs for the creator's lifetime plus 70 years, which is why photographs from the 1960s are still owned by somebody.
5. A copyright symbol and a date are useful notices, but they are not what creates the right.
6. Your own coursework carries your copyright, which is exactly why you are free to license your own project however you like.

Trademarks, Patents and Registered Designs Guard Different Things

1. Trademarks protect the signs that tell customers who made something: names, logos, and occasionally a specific colour or sound.
2. A trademark can be renewed for as long as the business keeps using it, which is why century old brand names are still protected.
3. Patents protect how an invention works, and the deal is that the inventor publishes the method in return for roughly 20 years of exclusive use.
4. Registered designs protect how a product looks, its shape, pattern and ornament, for up to about 25 years in many countries.
5. Patents are slow, expensive and only granted for something genuinely new, so almost no student project will ever involve filing one.
   1. Reading published patents is still excellent research, because the drawings show you exactly how somebody solved a mechanism you are stuck on.

Creative Commons: Permission Written in Advance

1. Creative Commons licences let a creator state up front what reuse they allow, so you can use the work without emailing anyone and waiting a fortnight.
2. Read one by its letters: BY means credit the creator, SA means share your version on the same terms, NC means non commercial only, ND means no changes.
3. CC BY is the most generous: use it, change it, even sell what you make, as long as the creator is credited.
4. CC BY-NC-ND is the tightest of the set: credit it, make no money from it, and change nothing.
5. CC0 gives up the rights altogether, putting the work as close to public domain as the law will allow.
6. Share alike is the condition that catches people out, because building on a share alike work can oblige you to release your own work on the same terms.

Royalty Free and Public Domain Are Not the Same Thing

1. Royalty free means you pay once, or nothing, and then owe nothing per use, which is a payment arrangement rather than a grant of freedom.
2. Royalty free licences still commonly forbid resale, use inside a logo, or printing beyond a set number of copies.
3. Public domain means copyright has expired or been given up, so there is nobody left to ask and no conditions to follow.
4. Age is not a guarantee, because a modern photograph of a very old painting can carry a fresh copyright of its own.
5. National archives, museums and space agencies publish large public domain image libraries that are genuinely safe for coursework.
6. Read the licence page rather than the wording on the download button, because sites use terms like free and royalty free very loosely.

Fonts, Images, Music and Code in a Real Project

1. Fonts are licensed software, so a typeface that came bundled with your computer may not be licensed for a logo you hand to a client.
   1. Open font libraries and the SIL Open Font License cover almost everything a student needs and spell out what you may do.
2. Shoot your own photographs wherever you can, because a picture you took yourself is fully yours.
3. Music is the quickest way to get a portfolio video muted, so take it from a library that states the licence in writing.
4. Code copied from a repository or a forum answer carries a licence too, and MIT, Apache and GPL each ask different things of you.
5. GPL code asks you to publish your own source under the GPL if you distribute what you built on it, which is a real decision rather than a formality.

Crediting Borrowed Work in Your Design Folder

1. Credit every borrowed asset where it appears, naming the creator, the title, the source and the licence.
2. Licensing and referencing are separate jobs: a licence decides whether you may use something, a citation records where it came from, and the article on academic citation covers how to format one.
3. Keep a running credits table from the first week, because rebuilding a list of sources the night before submission always goes badly.
4. Where an existing product inspired your design, say so and show what you changed, which strengthens Developing ideas rather than weakening it.
5. Academic honesty in MYP covers borrowed images, sounds and code in exactly the same way it covers borrowed sentences.