Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of
functional work,
artwork, or other creative content having no legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, improve, and share the content. Importantly, when free content is modified, expanded, or incorporated within another work, the resulting work must also be distributable as free content (see
share-alike). To be considered free content, a work must allow modification and redistribution.
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.
A 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.
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 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. In English, it is sometimes useful to use two less common but more precise words, the first adopted from
French and the second from
Latin:
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 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 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 open 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.
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Open catalogue*
Free encyclopedia*
Freedom*
Free software*
Freedom of information*
Commons*
Open content*
Public domain*
Free culture movement*
Open publishing*
Free Software Foundation *
GNU*
GPL*
LGPL*
Open Source Initiative*
Free software licenses*
Content development*
Free Content Definition - Wiki project to create a working definition for
free content.
