Website for promoting sharing-friendly licenses/Wiki
Please feel free to improve the following draft:
Contents
- 1 Main subjects
- 2 The contents
- 3 Content guidelines
- 4 Technical details
- 5 Similar websites to learn from
Main subjects
- What's the copyright concept? (A government monopoly)
- What's wrong with a full copyright? (Too restrictive)
- Why should I care? (It's the future of the community)
- Oh, no! That's totally communism! (Freedom isn't communism nor capitalism)
- What about my rights? (Community first. Public long-term benefit is way more important then the private short-term one)
- How can I solve this problem? (Use sharing-friendly licenses like CC's)
- What's the best license? (There is no 'best' license. But freer is better)
- Who has applied this idea? (GNU Project, Wikipedia, over than 100-million photos on Flickr, music websites)
- How can I apply it?
- On Flickr. (Short version of wikihow instructions)
- On my blog.
- ...?
- About us and the license. (GNU Generation, CC-BY-SA, Javascript Trap)
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, individualsSuggest another word!, used to do whatever we could to help our neighbors and friends. Three-hundred years ago, we lent them our copies of books and let them copy them by hand if they wanted to (and they did the same to us!). 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? Don't our community and the whole humanity have the right to enjoy the progress we together, as whole, achieved? What would a good citizen do?
How can I solve this problem?
This problem can be solved by using non-restrictives, sharing-frienly licenses, such as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC With the Creative Commons licese, your are free to:
Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
To Remix— to adapt the work to your needs.
Under the following conditions: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
You may not use this work for commercial purposes. (NC License only!)
The full license can be viewed at: Creative Commons Site
What about my rights?
When you write an article, sing a song or take a photo, you're actually building upon the past, upon the knowledge you have learned from so many resources. And when you publish that work, you're no longer the only one who's affected by any restrictions you might think of.
You have rights, but your community has some rights too. And you should only think of restrictions that don't harm that community.
You have some rights over your work, but when you support the sharing community, you'll also have some rights over other works done by community members. You'll save a lot of time by standing on the shoulders of your community, and they will too.
Who has applied this idea?
Many. Here are some examples:
- Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the human history, is free to use, share and change. It was built collaboratively by the free culture community, and it has became very popular and very large.
- Over than one-hundred-million photos on Flickr come with a permission to share.
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.
How can I apply it?
on Flickr
On my blog
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.