Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content having no legal restriction has been placed that significantly interferes with 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 distributed as free content. To be considered free content, a work must allow modification and redistribution.
So 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 been relinquished. However, such a work is still considered free content, because it may be used for any purpose whatsoever.
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, but which has little to do with monetary price or cost. The usage of "free" in "free content" carries only the latter meaning -- 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. 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 or Spanish 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 and open content[]
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 Portable Document Format (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[]
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.
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.
-- "Free content." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Dec 2005, 06:04 UTC. 19 Dec 2005, 02:31 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Free_content&oldid=31020104>.
See Also[]
- Open content
- Freedom of information
- Basilicus Copyright History