Open licenses not only preserve the intellectual property creator’s rights, but also allow third parties to copy, distribute and make use of their work, as long as it is for non-commercial purposes, highlighted, on May 26 th , UNESCO consultant Alexandre Pesserl, and Sérgio Branco, from ITS Rio (Institute for Technology & Society of Rio de Janeiro). The event opened the series “ABPI-ITS Dialogues”, organized by ABPI’s Software, Technology and Data Protection Study Committee, and ITS Rio, with the participation of coordinators Thamilla Talarico and Claudio Barbosa.
Pesserl addressed, among others, the copyright of APIs (Application Programming Interface) based on litigation involving the Android system, which was developed by Google without a Java license, belonging to Oracle. In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, reversing the lower court decision, asserted that the “structure, sequence and organization” of an API is protected by copyright. “Although the court did not overturn the copyright decision, it ruled strongly in favor of Google on whether the use made constituted fair use”, concluded the consultant.
In his presentation, Branco showed how Creative Commons is a license that deals with copyright and preserves the rights of its holders. Proof of this, he argued, is the large number of works licensed by this system (almost 1.8 billion, according to 2017 data) and the very low rate of judicialization. According to him, the Creative Commons website contains only 13 disputes of this nature. One of them took place in the Netherlands, with a photo from Flickr — a website for sharing photographs, drawings, and illustrations — published in a magazine. The author of the photo filed a lawsuit and won. Another example involved the SGAE, the copyright collection agency in Spain, and a nightclub that used music that, under the terms of the Creative Commons contract, allowed for economic exploitation. In this case, the judge found that there was no copyright infringement.
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