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Free content

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Free content describes any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content which is licensed in a way that does not restrict people's freedom to use the content for any purpose, especially, to copy it, modify it, and redistribute it. It is important to the definition of free content that such works may be modified, expanded, and incorporated within other works, and that the resulting work may itself be distributed, either just as freely as or under more restrictive terms than the original. If content is available to be used but may not be changed, it is not free content.

Copyrighted content must be explicitly declared free by the copyright holder, usually by including or referencing licensing statements from within the work.

Free-content licenses may be copyleft, in which case modifications of the work must themselves be distributed only under the original free license. Free content licenses may also be non-copyleft, which means that the work may be modified and then distributed under a different license, even one that is less free.

Most free sex 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.

A work in the public domain cannot be licensed because, by definition, it is no longer copyrighted (say, due to the expiration or relinquishment of its original copyright); however, such a work is still considered free content, because it may be used for any purpose whatsoever.

Examples of free-content licenses

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.

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.

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 the latter meaning -- free 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.

Many languages other than English use two different words for these distinct concepts. In English, it is sometimes useful to use two less common but more precise words, both adopted from French: libre (meaning free as in speech) and gratis (meaning free as in beer). In these terms, free-content works are always libre but not necessarily gratis.

Free content and open content

Free content licenses 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 distribute the source PageMaker or word-processor document 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 an "transparent" format, i.e., in an open format whose specification is freely available to everybody.

See also

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