As mentioned before, an author’s rights can be sold; this is the way the great majority of authors earn money nowadays. However, such sales provide considerable material incentives to only a select few, the selection of whom depends least of all on the brilliance of the work.
Legalities
No specific law addresses the need for open licenses. So, how would such a license work? Virtually all open licenses are claimed by their developers to be based on copyright law. A rights holder, having been granted them by law, can relinquish some of the rights. In order to do so, he provides a contract to a user. This legal position has some weak points, though:
- Any license based on copyright law lasts as long as the copyright.
- Copyright laws provide different rights in different countries.
- Cultural affairs are not regulated only by copyrights. There are about a dozen related laws, acts, and rulings in the U.S. alone.
Obviously, a license, which is supposed to support the normal existence of a creative work, should somehow adjust to the above limitations. Thus, it is necessary for such a license to be backed through legal means that are included in the actual text of the license itself.
Analysis of Some Open Licenses
The above text provides a logical framework for analyzing licenses that govern cultural affairs. This framework does not address music, songs, or any other specific area, but it does address different fundamental culture-related ssues. This is for at least two reasons. First, arts, sciences, and even engineering, intertwine to such a degree nowadays that it is often hard to distinguish between fields, genres and laws applicable to a single work. Second, we have seen that the nature of creativity is the same in any human activity.
