http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito Exploring free licenses and their practical uses Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:43:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en An increasing number of contributions made on the Internet today are released into the public domain. Basically this means that the author disowns any copyright on the material, allowing it to be copied, modified, and redistributed for any purpose (including commercial purposes) without the author’s permission. Once a work is released ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/08/the-public-domain/ Of course, Wikipedia articles, blog entries, and photos aren’t the only thing that can be freely licensed. What really kicked off the free license movement was the introduction of free software licenses. The most famous may be the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is the license under which a ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/07/free-software-licenses/ Countless websites have sprung up that allow users to upload their photos and other artwork to a website where they may be viewed by visitors from around the world. Some of these sites, including Wikimedia Commons (a media repository for Wikipedia and its sister projects) and Flickr (a popular photo ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/06/photo-sharing-and-creative-commons/ Today, stories of high school students pasting in content from Wikipedia into their own essays and research projects abound. Some educators have thrown their hands up in the air, baffled by this whole "Internet" thing. Others have clamped down, forbidding the use of Wikipedia in the classroom and calling it ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/05/wikipedias-copyright/ It's been nearly a month since the Wikimedia Foundation announced compatibility of the CC-BY-SA license with the GFDL, but the details are still not clear. Immediate reactions on the Wikimedia Foundation's community mailing list, foundation-l, seemed positive overall but rather confused. Users wondered whether a license like CC-BY-SA and the GFDL ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/01/wikipedia-and-cc-by-sa/ The Creative Commons family of licenses, created and administered by the Creative Commons organization founded by Lawrence Lessig, is a suite of licenses designed for easy use by both amateur and professional content creators around the world. The Creative Commons licenses allow a great deal of freedom to modify, reuse, and ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/01/the-creative-commons-licenses/ Wikipedia, since its very inception, has used the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL, covered in an earlier post) to license its articles and many of its images. Compared to other, more traditional websites that offer their content under a less free, less open license, this is a big step -- ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2008/01/01/wikipedia-and-the-gfdl/ Citizendium, the fledgling semi-user editable online encyclopedia that aims to unseat Wikipedia from its cyber-throne by enforcing strict editorial guidelines, has chosen to license its articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) license, according to a press release. This doesn't come as much of a surprise -- Citizendium has some ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2007/12/24/citizendium-chooses-cc-by-sa/ The GNU Free Documentation License, or the GFDL, is a free license probably best known for being the license used by Wikipedia. It was designed by the Free Software Foundation, which is the parent body of the GNU Project (including Linux) and other famous licenses such as the GNU General ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2007/12/24/the-gfdl/ Wikimedia, the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation, and the Creative Commons have agreed to make the GFDL (the GNU Free Documentation License, the license that Wikipedia is licensed under) compatible with the Creative Commons licenses. The blog post linked above is sort of inaccurate, calling it a ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/keito/2007/12/06/wikipedia-to-be-compatible-with-creative-commons/