Thread: Connection between Copyright and patents

Is there any connection between the two at all?

What has copyright to do with licensing and what does it have to do with free software? Well, under today's copyright law, any work "that iso-written or composed somehow is automatically copyrighted. So, there is a copyright on that work or particular authorship. By default, the copyright law says that people are not allowed to copy or distribute or modify the program. In some countries people are not allowed to run it without permission. So, how do you make free software?

The only way is through a formal declaration by the copyright holder saying that you, the user, have the four freedoms. That declaration, we call the free software licence. It is not the only context in which the term 'licence' is used. Licences are signed contracts, but this one is not. This is simply a unilateral grant of permission from the copyright holders of the program.

Free software licences have some conditions. It could be a tiny requirement like you can't remove this licence, but some other licences have more requirements. For example, I wrote a licence, which is one of the many free software licences, called the GNU General Public Licence or GNU GPL. And it is used in over two¬thirds of all the free software packages. However, GPL is not all-there are other free software licences too.

What's special abol}t this licence is there are certain requirements we call. copy-left and that is: "When you redistribute copies of the program, either exact or modified, you must keep the licence the same and you must distribute the whole of the modified:version under the same licence and make the source code available These licences make an extra effort to defend the freedom of every user.