Fergus Whyte, one of the newly called advocates at Arnot Manderson, has published a piece in this month’s Journal of the Law Society of Scotland exploring issues around charities, copyright and the uses that can be made of copyleft licensing by such bodies.
Fergus was formerly a volunteer director of an Edinburgh based sustainability and zero-waste organisation, the Shrub Co-op. He was involved in that organisation’s transition to a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation. He continues as a volunteer member of the organisation’s governance and policy working group. As part of that group, he was involved in drafting new policies for the organisation. As Fergus explains it, he was trying to think about how the Shrub could offer additional benefits to similar organisations by making some of its work freely available to the public and that led to an exploration of the issues of who owns copyright within a charity and how permissive and free licenses of copyright materials could be used by charities both to benefit them and the wider community.