In this article I refer not to built works but to all material generated as a result of architectural activity: material like plans, maps, photomontages, texts, videos, graphics, 3D models, scripts, Grasshopper sketches, etc., from which we don’t usually expect to make any additional income and which are susceptible to dissemination, communication and exploitation by other people.
For specific materials like graphic resources (blocks, cut-outs, cliparts, icons, etc.), fonts and datasets, specific licences like the General Asset License, the Open Font License and the Open Database License have recently been developed.
Is it commercial use when someone includes an image of yours in a studio’s blog? Or in a competition board? Or in a magazine? And what if the magazine is an academic journal? When is anything NOT commercial?
The debate over what exactly constitutes a “modification” is also quite complex. See this article by Alistair Brown.
At the other extreme, if we don’t care what happens to our creations or if we want to make a contribution to the world without receiving any credit at all, we could use CC0, which would place our work in the public domain and make it available for anyone to use however they want.
These types of licences are known as “public-domain-equivalent licenses” or “waivers”. If you’re feeling a bit more transgressive, there’s something similar called the WTFPL, or “Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License”.
At Ecosistema Urbano, for example, we chose the less restrictive CC BY, which is ideal for freely sharing material in a professional context, whereas for personal work I prefer to use the CC BY-SA licence to make sure that what I do stays “open source”.
In an earlier post we looked at reasons for protecting or not protecting our work with a strict copyright, and proposed open source licences as an alternative more beneficial both to the original designer and to everyone else.
The next question is: what open source licences can we use to share the results of our work?1
Above all, we need to remember that open source licences don’t necessarily mean relinquishing copyright protection. On the contrary, they’re based on our right, as creators, to expressly state under what conditions we allow our creations to be shared or reused, and to establish how much control we want to retain over them. But we can always fall back on copyright as protection against undesired exploitation of our work.
One of the best open source options for material generated in architecture, urban planning and similar fields is Creative Commons (CC), a set of OS licences specially created to regulate rights applicable to creative works. Simplified to make them easier to understand, choose and apply2, CC licences allow four conditions. For use in architecture, it would be wise to take into account the implications of each condition before deciding which one would be the most suitable:
CC licences are not exclusive. As copyright holders, we can grant special permission whenever and to whoever we want, waiving the obligation to fulfil the conditions stipulated in the licence. We could, then, choose to apply a more restrictive CC licence and then authorise specific uses of our work on a case-by-case basis. In architecture, however, unlike in other professions, intellectual property rights are rarely a source of significant income. It’s usually more profitable to grant permissive licences which encourage others to share what we’re doing, thus obtaining another kind of return while at the same time contributing to the development of our discipline5.
The decision to include one or another condition in the licence, between restricting and encouraging access to our work, depends on the message we want to transmit and what we hope to obtain as a result6.
How would we like the results of our work to be used? What do we, or don’t we, want to happen to them?
I hope this article has made you think about these questions and that your answers to them will help you decide which of those four conditions to include in your own CC licence.
In this article I refer not to built works but to all material generated as a result of architectural activity: material like plans, maps, photomontages, texts, videos, graphics, 3D models, scripts, Grasshopper sketches, etc., from which we don’t usually expect to make any additional income and which are susceptible to dissemination, communication and exploitation by other people.
For specific materials like graphic resources (blocks, cut-outs, cliparts, icons, etc.), fonts and datasets, specific licences like the General Asset License, the Open Font License and the Open Database License have recently been developed.
Is it commercial use when someone includes an image of yours in a studio’s blog? Or in a competition board? Or in a magazine? And what if the magazine is an academic journal? When is anything NOT commercial?
The debate over what exactly constitutes a “modification” is also quite complex. See this article by Alistair Brown.
At the other extreme, if we don’t care what happens to our creations or if we want to make a contribution to the world without receiving any credit at all, we could use CC0, which would place our work in the public domain and make it available for anyone to use however they want.
These types of licences are known as “public-domain-equivalent licenses” or “waivers”. If you’re feeling a bit more transgressive, there’s something similar called the WTFPL, or “Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License”.
At Ecosistema Urbano, for example, we chose the less restrictive CC BY, which is ideal for freely sharing material in a professional context, whereas for personal work I prefer to use the CC BY-SA licence to make sure that what I do stays “open source”.
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