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In both the US and Canada, software code falls under copyright law.
The owner of the copyright can decide how this code may be used, copied, distributed, changed, among other activities.
Warning! Copyright protects the language and words used to express ideas, concepts and themes. It does not protect not the ideas, concepts or themes themselves.
In the USA, the owner of copyright has the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:
- To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
- To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
- To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
- To publicly perform the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
- To publicly display the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
- To digitally transmit sound recordings by means of digital audio transmission.
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You if you are author the code and you are doing this for yourself (i.e., not for your work)
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In such a case, you (the person who typed the code) automatically become the copyright owner.
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In the USA, you do not need to use the copyright symbol © .
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Best practices: Use the copyright symbol along with your name and the year of first publication.
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Register tools that you publicate at USA Copyright Registration Portal
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The employer or client if you were doing a job for them.
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Implications if you would like to reuse a code that you did for your employer in a different situation:
- Negotiate a licence to use the code you wrote.
As mentioned above, creative works (like software code) are automatically eligible for intellectual property (and thus copyright) protection
Reusing creative works without a license is dangerous, because the copyright holders could sue you for copyright infringement
Thus, if you publicly share your creative work (i.e., software code), you should let others know if and how they can reuse it
This is done via the inclusion of a LICENSE or LICENSE.txt file in the base directory of the repository that clearly states under which license the content is being made available
Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation.
A license grants rights to others (the licensees) that they would otherwise not have. What rights are being granted under which conditions differs, often only slightly, from one license to another.
Licenses are legal documents and written by legal experts. But you can choose an already written one that best suits your situation.
In practice, a few licenses are by far the most popular, and choosealicense.com will help you find a common license that suits your needs.
For visualizations, reports, presentations, or tutorials, use The Creative Commons licences.
They are now widely used in academia and the publishing industry.