Website for promoting sharing-friendly licenses/Wiki

Please feel free to improve the following draft:

Main subjects

• What's the copyright concept?
• What's wrong with a full copyright?
• Why should I care?
• What about my rights?
• How can I solve this problem?
• What's the best license?
• Who has applied this idea?/
• I'm on Flickr, how can I share my works?
• About us and the license

The contents

What's the copyright concept?

The copyright is a monopoly enforced by the government on certain work for the author. The copyright system is meant to be in the good of the community. Back 300 years ago, when the copyright concept invented, it prohibited individuals from doing things that they weren't able to do anyway, because no individual was able to make even tens of copies to violate the law. It affected big guys with expensive printing facilities only. So it was O.K. for us to give up something we didn't have and to accept such system. But does this system work that way anymore?

What's wrong with a full copyright?

We, individuals, used to do whatever we could to help our neighbors and friends. Three-hundred years ago, we lent them our copies of books, we let them copy our copies by hand if they wanted to. But why should we do that now in the age of network computers? We can simply right click on a file and make hundreds of copies within minutes! The copyright system is affecting us harmfully we cannot be good neighbors and friends anymore if we choose to obey the law.

Why should I care?

It's always good to live in a collaborative community where you give and receive freely. Where you build upon other people's work and share the amazing results with your friends and neighbors.

The Internet is a very great, powerful tool for creating such a community, and we, as whole, should never try to eliminate the power of that tool. The restrictions of the copyright system actually benefits the big media corporations only, we're the victims of this system.

As a way to solve this problem, we need to start changing the situation from bottom to top so we can all get the advantage of a shared knowledge and creativity. Don't we have the right to enjoy our human culture? Doesn't our community has the right to enjoy our creativity? What would a good citizen do?

What about my rights?

Many licenses also also work to preserve your rights. You can require attribution when reused, or not allow it to be used commercially.

What's the best license?

There is no single "best" license. There are many different ones, many of which can be further customized to to suit your needs.

About us and the license

We're a sub-project of GNU Generation initiative by the Free Software Foundation. We are all pre-university students that believe in free software and free culture. We ask you to join us in that initiative, where we meet to find and invent ways to support the free software community.

You're free to use all of this website text and images under CC-BY-SA. All Javascripts are under GNU GPL license version 3 or any later version with the following exception:

As a special exception to the GPL, any HTML file which merely makes function calls to this code, and for that purpose includes it by reference shall be deemed a separate work for copyright law purposes. If you modify this code, you may extend this exception to your version of the code, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.

Content guidelines

• It should be easy-to-read for both, young and old, beginners and experts.
• It should be 100% correct English. (I, Osama, may not be able to achieve that, so we're going to need some native English speakers).
• It should be translator-friendly. We'll encourage people to translate it.
• It will be licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
• It should focus on ethics as well as the practical advantages.

Technical details

• The website will be a static HTML (not PHP, Python, etc) with Javascript, CSS and images.
• It should be as much attractive as we can make it.
• It should pass W3 validation test.