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