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Free content

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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.)

Libre and gratis

Besides free as in freedom, there is also another important meaning of the word free: free of charge. The two meanings of the term free are often illustrated with the phrases "free as in beer," which alludes to monetary price or cost but has little to do with freedom, and "free as in speech," which alludes to the widely recognized freedom of speech (see, for example, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution), but which has little to do with monetary price or cost. The usage of "free" in "free content" carries only the latter meaning - as in speech - because the emphasis is on everyone's freedom to engage with the content, understand it, modify it, and share it with others. This ambiguity in the word free can create confusion, especially since many (but by no means all) free content works are also available at no charge. Many languages other than English use two different words for these distinct concepts.

Free content and open content

Free content licenses generally differ from open content licenses in that they require a "source" copy of the content to be provided. For example, a free content publisher should make the source document (e.g. InDesign or word-processor file) available along with a PDF, which in this case would be considered the "object" copy of the creative work. Some free content licenses have stronger requirements. For example, the GNU Free Documentation License not only requires that a "source" copy of the content is provided, but that the source copy should be in a "transparent" format, in other words, in an open format whose specification is freely available to everybody.

Free content licenses

Free content licenses may be copyleft—in which case modifications of the work must themselves be distributed only under the terms of the original free license—or 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

  • Free Content Definition - Wiki project to create a working definition for free content.
  • Free Content Articles - Free software projects and articles in Bulgaria. Information about 'Open Fest Plovdiv' and other open projects.
  • Free Web Content - Articles Factory Premium content service delivering current and archived articles for a wide variety of life topics. Includes tools for a self-organizing library.
  • Free Content Articles - Article Alley free content publishing service with articles across a range of topics.
  • Open Knowledge Definition - project under the aegis of the Open Knowledge Foundation which provides a definition of 'open' suitable for content and data.
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