Code in a conference paper: should I put license terms there?

Question

I am currently writing a conference paper (an IEEE conf, if that matters) in which I include a piece of code. Pertaining to the license of the code, should I, at the beginning of the code, write something like

-- Author: Ton Ami, 2021.
-- License: MIT License. ------> this
--  Below is code to help you make a better world
...

Or should I just put the code without any license terms?

In any case, what would the license of the code be?

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Answer 1

If you publish something and don't give an explicit license (US, anyway), the default is "all rights reserved". You can provide the license elsewhere if you like, as long as you still hold copyright. But if you transfer copyright to someone else, and it doesn't already have an explicit license, then they own copyright and you can no longer provide a license.

If you do provide a license before copyright transfer then, for most such licenses, the license is "sticky" and can't be withdrawn, even by the new copyright holder. If you do that without informing the new copyright owner then you can be in some trouble, since you can no longer transfer "all rights", but only the limited rights you still hold.

Some publishers, including conferences, will be fine with this. Others not and you could wind up having a paper rejected/withdrawn. I suspect IEEE might be lenient here, but they need to be informed of any prior license to anything they publish. Putting it in the paper itself makes it obvious, of course.

However, it isn't where you provide the license terms (in the paper or elsewhere), but when you detail the license terms, assuming that you can, at all.

Answer 2

I would suggest that you deposit your code (with whatever license you want) in zenodo and include a link to it from your paper, in addition to including it in your text.

It doesn't matter what the conference copyright transfer is if your code is released under MIT. I guess they could refuse to take your paper as a result but that's never happened to the best of my knowledge. As there is no provision for revoking the MIT licence, even if you give them the copyright, you'll be able to do anything you want with the code because it is licensed to you under the MIT license (including continuing to distribute it), as will anyone else who obtains it from zenodo.

Answer 3

Technically, you should include the full MIT license at the head of any major source files in your code. (here's a link to the full license text). Since you are using the MIT license, which is incredibly permissive, it functionally doesn't make much of a difference if you include it or not in all your source files.

This is assuming you are posting a link to the actual code (e.g. to the github page or personal website etc.). If you are posting the code in your paper, definitely do not include the license there, as no one ever does that.

Answer 4

Ask your university's lawyers. They'll need to check whether the publisher's copyright agreement attempts to overreach, perhaps resulting in the inadvertent transfer of rights to the publisher.

Alternatively, include code extracts under fair use, attributing yourself as the programmer (rather than the author), removing any claim that the code is a contribution, and mentioning somewhere that the code is under MIT License. (Strictly speaking, university lawyers should still check whether you've complied with fair use and not violated the MIT license.)

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^{I assume code was written by the OP.}