Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose [1] [ better source needed ] including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
In most countries, the Berne Convention grants copyright holders control over their creations by default. Therefore, copyrighted content must be explicitly declared free by the authors, which is usually accomplished by referencing or including licensing statements from within the work. The right to reuse such a work is granted by the authors in a license known as a free license, a free distribution license, or an open license, depending on the rights assigned. These freedoms given to users in the reuse of works (that is, the right to freely use, study, modify or distribute these works, possibly also for commercial purposes) are often associated with obligations (to cite the original author, to maintain the original license of the reused content) or restrictions (excluding commercial use, banning certain media) chosen by the author.[ citation needed ] There are a number of standardized licenses offering varied options that allow authors to choose the type of reuse of their work that they wish to authorize or forbid.
There are a number of different definitions of free content in regular use. Legally, however, free content is very similar to open content. An analogy is a use of the rival terms free software and open-source, which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones. [2] [ self-published source? ] The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement. [3] [4] For instance, the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition describes "open" as synonymous with the definition of free in the "Definition of Free Cultural Works" (as also in the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition). [5] For such free/open content both movements recommend the same three Creative Commons licenses, the CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0. [6] [7] [8] [9]
Copyright is a legal concept, which gives the author or creator of a work legal control over the duplication and public performance of their work. In many jurisdictions, this is limited by a time period after which the works then enter the public domain. Copyright laws are a balance between the rights of creators of intellectual and artistic works and the rights of others to build upon those works. During the time period of copyright the author's work may only be copied, modified, or publicly performed with the consent of the author, unless the use is a fair use. Traditional copyright control limits the use of the work of the author to those who either pay royalties to the author for usage of the author's content or limit their use to fair use. Secondly, it limits the use of content whose author cannot be found. [10] Finally, it creates a perceived barrier between authors by limiting derivative works, such as mashups and collaborative content. [11] Although open content has been described as a counterbalance to copyright, open content licenses rely on a copyright holder's power to license their work, as copyleft which also utilizes copyright for such a purpose. [12]
The public domain is a range of creative works whose copyright has expired or was never established, as well as ideas and facts [note 1] which are ineligible for copyright. A public domain work is a work whose author has either relinquished to the public or no longer can claim control over, the distribution and usage of the work. As such, any person may manipulate, distribute, or otherwise use the work, without legal ramifications. A work in the public domain or released under a permissive license may be referred to as "copycenter". [13]
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work. [14] The aim of copyleft is to use the legal framework of copyright to enable non-author parties to be able to reuse and, in many licensing schemes, modify content that is created by an author. Unlike works in the public domain, the author still maintains copyright over the material, however, the author has granted a non-exclusive license to any person to distribute, and often modify, the work. Copyleft licenses require that any derivative works be distributed under the same terms and that the original copyright notices be maintained. A symbol commonly associated with copyleft is a reversal of the copyright symbol, facing the other way; the opening of the C points left rather than right. Unlike the copyright symbol, the copyleft symbol does not have a codified meaning. [15]
Projects that provide free content exist in several areas of interest, such as software, academic literature, general literature, music, images, video, and engineering. Technology has reduced the cost of publication and reduced the entry barrier sufficiently to allow for the production of widely disseminated materials by individuals or small groups. Projects to provide free literature and multimedia content have become increasingly prominent owing to the ease of dissemination of materials that are associated with the development of computer technology. Such dissemination may have been too costly prior to these technological developments.
In media, which includes textual, audio, and visual content, free licensing schemes such as some of the licenses made by Creative Commons have allowed for the dissemination of works under a clear set of legal permissions. Not all Creative Commons licenses are entirely free; their permissions may range from very liberal general redistribution and modification of the work to a more restrictive redistribution-only licensing. Since February 2008, Creative Commons licenses which are entirely free carry a badge indicating that they are "approved for free cultural works". [16] Repositories exist which exclusively feature free material and provide content such as photographs, clip art, music, [17] and literature. [18] While extensive reuse of free content from one website in another website is legal, it is usually not sensible because of the duplicate content problem. Wikipedia is amongst the most well-known databases of user-uploaded free content on the web. While the vast majority of content on Wikipedia is free content, some copyrighted material is hosted under fair-use criteria.
Free and open-source software, which is often referred to as open source software and free software, is a maturing technology with companies using them to provide services and technology to both end-users and technical consumers. The ease of dissemination increases modularity, which allows for smaller groups to contribute to projects as well as simplifying collaboration. Some claim that open source development models offer similar peer-recognition and collaborative benefit incentive as in more classical fields such as scientific research, with the social structures that result leading to decreased production costs. [19]
Given sufficient interest in a software component, by using peer-to-peer distribution methods, distribution costs may be reduced, easing the burden of infrastructure maintenance on developers. As distribution is simultaneously provided by consumers, these software distribution models are scalable; that is, the method is feasible regardless of the number of consumers. In some cases, free software vendors may use peer-to-peer technology as a method of dissemination. [20] Project hosting and code distribution is not a problem for most free projects as a number of providers offer these services free of charge.
Free content principles have been translated into fields such as engineering, where designs and engineering knowledge can be readily shared and duplicated, in order to reduce overheads associated with project development. Open design principles can be applied in engineering and technological applications, with projects in mobile telephony, small-scale manufacture, [21] the automotive industry, [22] [23] and even agricultural areas. Technologies such as distributed manufacturing can allow computer-aided manufacturing and computer-aided design techniques to be able to develop small-scale production of components for the development of new, or repair of existing, devices. Rapid fabrication technologies underpin these developments, which allow end-users of technology to be able to construct devices from pre-existing blueprints, using software and manufacturing hardware to convert information into physical objects.
In academic work, the majority of works are not free, although the percentage of works that are open access is growing. Open access refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions to access and free of many restrictions on use (e.g. certain copyright and license restrictions). [24] Authors may see open access publishing as a way of expanding the audience that is able to access their work to allow for greater impact, or support it for ideological reasons. [25] [26] Open access publishers such as PLOS and BioMed Central provide capacity for review and publishing of free works; such publications are currently more common in science than humanities. Various funding institutions and governing research bodies have mandated that academics must produce their works to be open-access, in order to qualify for funding, such as the US National Institutes of Health, Research Councils UK (effective 2016) and the European Union (effective 2020). [27] [28] [29]
At an institutional level, some universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have adopted open access publishing by default by introducing their own mandates. [30] Some mandates may permit delayed publication and may charge researchers for open access publishing. [31] [32] For teaching purposes, some universities, including MIT, provide freely available course content, such as lecture notes, video resources and tutorials. This content is distributed via Internet to the general public. Publication of such resources may be either by a formal institution-wide program, [33] or informally, by individual academics or departments.
Open content publication has been seen as a method of reducing costs associated with information retrieval in research, as universities typically pay to subscribe for access to content that is published through traditional means. [9] [34] Subscriptions for non-free content journals may be expensive for universities to purchase, though the articles are written and peer-reviewed by academics themselves at no cost to the publisher. This has led to disputes between publishers and some universities over subscription costs, such as the one that occurred between the University of California and the Nature Publishing Group. [35] [36]
Free and open content has been used to develop alternative routes towards higher education. Open content is a free way of obtaining higher education that is "focused on collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content." [37] There are multiple projects and organizations that promote learning through open content, including OpenCourseWare and Khan Academy. Some universities, like MIT, Yale, and Tufts are making their courses freely available on the internet. [38]
There are also a number of organizations promoting the creation of openly licensed textbooks such as the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library, Connexions, OpenStax College, the Saylor Academy, Open Textbook Challenge, and Wikibooks.[ citation needed ]
Any country has its own law and legal system, sustained by its legislation, which consists of documents. In a democratic country, laws are published as open content, in principle free content; but in general, there are no explicit licenses attributed for the text of each law, so the license must be assumed as an implied license . Only a few countries have explicit licenses in their law-documents, as the UK's Open Government Licence (a CC BY compatible license). In the other countries, the implied license comes from its proper rules (general laws and rules about copyright in government works). The automatic protection provided by the Berne Convention does not apply to the texts of laws: Article 2.4 excludes the official texts from the automatic protection. It is also possible to "inherit" the license from context. The set of country's law-documents is made available through national repositories. Examples of law-document open repositories: LexML Brazil, Legislation.gov.uk, and N-Lex. In general, a law-document is offered in more than one (open) official version, but the main one is that published by a government gazette. So, law-documents can eventually inherit license expressed by the repository or by the gazette that contains it.
This section needs to be updated. The reason given is: The Open Content Project was replaced by Creative Commons over 10 years ago.(July 2024) |
The concept of applying free software licenses to content was introduced by Michael Stutz, who in 1997 wrote the paper "Applying Copyleft to Non-Software Information" for the GNU Project. [39] The term "open content" was coined by David A. Wiley in 1998 and evangelized via the Open Content Project, describing works licensed under the Open Content License (a non-free share-alike license, see 'Free content' below) and other works licensed under similar terms. [40]
The website of the Open Content Project once defined open content as 'freely available for modification, use and redistribution under a license similar to those used by the open-source / free software community'. [40] However, such a definition would exclude the Open Content License because that license forbids charging for content; a right required by free and open-source software licenses.[ citation needed ]
It has since come to describe a broader class of content without conventional copyright restrictions. The openness of content can be assessed under the '5Rs Framework' based on the extent to which it can be retained, reused, revised, remixed and redistributed by members of the public without violating copyright law. [41] Unlike free content and content under open-source licenses, there is no clear threshold that a work must reach to qualify as 'open content'.
The 5Rs are put forward on the Open Content Project website as a framework for assessing the extent to which content is open:
- Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) [41]
This broader definition distinguishes open content from open-source software, since the latter must be available for commercial use by the public. However, it is similar to several definitions for open educational resources, which include resources under noncommercial and verbatim licenses. [42] [43]
In 2003, David Wiley announced that the Open Content Project had been succeeded by Creative Commons and their licenses; Wiley joined as "Director of Educational Licenses". [44] [45]
In 2005, the Open Icecat project was launched, in which product information for e-commerce applications was created and published under the Open Content License. It was embraced by the tech sector, which was already quite open source minded.
In 2006, a Creative Commons' successor project, the Definition of Free Cultural Works, was introduced for free content. [46] It was put forth by Erik Möller, Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Benjamin Mako Hill, Angela Beesley, and others. [47] The Definition of Free Cultural Works is used by the Wikimedia Foundation. [48] In 2009, the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons licenses were marked as "Approved for Free Cultural Works". [49]
Another successor project is the Open Knowledge Foundation, founded by Rufus Pollock in Cambridge, in 2004 [50] as a global non-profit network to promote and share open content and data. [51]
In 2007 the OKF gave an Open Knowledge Definition for "content such as music, films, books; data be it scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise; government and other administrative information". [52] In October 2014 with version 2.0 Open Works and Open Licenses were defined and "open" is described as synonymous to the definitions of open/free in the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition, and the Definition of Free Cultural Works. [53]
A distinct difference is the focus given to the public domain, open access, and readable open formats. OKF recommends six conformant licenses: three of OKN's (Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence, Open Data Commons Attribution License, Open Data Commons Open Database License) and the CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0 Creative Commons licenses. [54] [55] [56]
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The Free Art License (FAL) is a copyleft license that grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works except for computer hardware and software, including for commercial use.
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software.
Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft licenses are free content or free software licenses with a share-alike condition.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Open-source religions employ open-source methods for the sharing, construction, and adaptation of religious belief systems, content, and practice. In comparison to religions utilizing proprietary, authoritarian, hierarchical, and change-resistant structures, open-source religions emphasize sharing in a cultural Commons, participation, self-determination, decentralization, and evolution. They apply principles used in organizing communities developing open-source software for organizing group efforts innovating with human culture. New open-source religions may develop their rituals, praxes, or systems of beliefs through a continuous process of refinement and dialogue among participating practitioners. Organizers and participants often see themselves as part of a more generalized open-source and free-culture movement.
Open-source Judaism is a name given to initiatives within the Jewish community employing open content and open-source licensing strategies for collaboratively creating and sharing works about or inspired by Judaism. Open-source efforts in Judaism utilize licensing strategies by which contemporary products of Jewish culture under copyright may be adopted, adapted, and redistributed with credit and attribution accorded to the creators of these works. Often collaborative, these efforts are comparable to those of other open-source religious initiatives inspired by the free culture movement to openly share and broadly disseminate seminal texts and techniques under the aegis of copyright law. Combined, these initiatives describe an open-source movement in Judaism that values correct attribution of sources, creative sharing in an intellectual commons, adaptable future-proof technologies, open technological standards, open access to primary and secondary sources and their translations, and personal autonomy in the study and craft of works of Torah.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents.
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.
The Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses.
A free license or open license is a license that allows copyrighted work to be reused, modified, and redistributed. These uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or other Intellectual property (IP) laws. The term broadly covers free content licenses and open-source licenses, also known as free software licenses.
A public license or public copyright license is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.
The Open Definition is published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) to define openness for any type of data, content, or other knowledge. The definition's stated purpose is to "[make] precise the meaning of ‘open’ with respect to knowledge". Although it draws philosophically from both the open-source and free software movements, the Open Definition prioritizes license compatibility over copyleft principles requiring derivative works to be released under a free license. The Open Definition contains requirements for content licenses to be considered open licenses, and the OKF maintains a list of compatible licenses. The definition also requires open access, machine readability, and the use of open formats. The OKF's Open Software Service Definition is derived from the Open Definition.
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open source appropriate technology, and open source drug discovery.
Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to the Free Software Foundation (and the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman) or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or university-research projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public domain software, and so on