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This article has been tagged since November 2006.
Free content, or free information, is any kind
of
functional work,
artwork, or other creative content having no significant
legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use,
redistribute and modify the content.
Free content encompasses all works in the
public domain and also those
copyrighted works whose
licenses honor and uphold the freedoms mentioned above.
Because the law by default grants copyright holders
monopolistic control over their creations, copyrighted
content must be explicitly declared free, usually by the
referencing or inclusion of licensing statements from within the
work.
(Work in the public domain cannot be licensed because, by
definition, its copyright has expired or has been relinquished.
However, such a work is still considered free content, because
it may be used for any purpose whatsoever--except, naturally,
being re-copyrighted.)
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Contents
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1
Free content licenses
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2
See also
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3
References
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4
External links
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Free content licenses
Free content licenses may be
copyleftin which case modifications of the work must
themselves be distributed only under the terms of the original
free licenseor else they are non-copyleft, which means that the
licensed work may be modified and then distributed under a
different license, even one that is less free.
Most free content licenses contain provisions specifying that
derivative works must attribute or give credit to the authors of
the original, a requirement which promotes intellectual honesty
and discourages
plagiarism without imposing so great a burden as to weaken
the claim of such licenses to being truly free.
The
Design Science License (DSL), and
GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) are copyleft licenses
for free content. The
FreeBSD Documentation License is an example of a
non-copyleft license. The
GNU General Public License (GPL) can also be used as a free
content license.
Against DRM license is a free copyleft license for artworks
published by
Free Creations.
Other examples of free content licenses are some of those
published by
Creative Commons when commercial use and derivative works
are not restricted, although they do not require a source copy
of the license be provided. Note that not all Creative Commons
licenses are free content as defined here. The
Libre Society project also has some free content licenses
and a critique of the Creative Commons philosophy.
It is questioned whether the
IANG
license complies with the definition of free content given here,
since it puts responsibilities on redistribution the product,
notably by requiring access to financial accounting.
See also
Many of the
Wikimedia Foundation's projects, including
Wikipedia, are free content.
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Copyright commandeering
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Creative Commons
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Free Culture Movement
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Free software and
open source software
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Freedom (philosophy)
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Freedom of information
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Libre knowledge
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Open access
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Open content
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Open publishing
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Public domain
References
External links
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Definition of Free Cultural Works - a definition of
"free content" or "free cultural works" similar to the free
software definition
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Open Knowledge Definition - project under the aegis of
the Open Knowledge Foundation which provides a definition of
'open' suitable for content and data.
Categories:
Articles lacking sources from November 2006 |
All articles lacking sources |
Copyright licenses |
Digital art |
Free content licenses |
Free content |
Open source licenses |
Libre
