Criteria for Liberated Works
From Freedom Buyer
All liberated works must allow the following freedoms to everyone who receives a copy of them:
- The freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
- The freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
- The freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
- The freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works
These are the freedoms defined by the Definition of Free Cultural Works. None of them may be substantially lacking, for example by restricting the distribution of the work for commercial purposes. All liberated software must also allow the freedoms defined by the Free Software Definition.
For these freedoms to be allowed for a work, certain legal and practical restrictions must be removed from it which prevent people from exercising them.
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[edit] Legal restrictions
In order for a liberated work to allow these freedoms legally, it must either be put into the public domain or licensed under a copyright licence which allows them for everyone who receives a copy of it. Please see this page for a list of popular licences which allow all of these freedoms.
Any licence used for any liberated software must also specifically be a free software licence approved by the Free Software Foundation. Please see this page for a list of them. It should also be compatible with the GNU GPL.
[edit] Copyleft
A copyleft licence should preferably be used for most liberated works, to encourage the release of more free creative works in the future. The copyright holder might also only agree to liberate the work if a copyleft licence is used. However, the decision of which licence to use is left the individual campaign organisers. For some works, a non-copyleft licence may be more appropriate, and it might be more agreeable to certain copyright holders and contributors to some campaigns.
When a copyleft licence is used, it's useful for compatibility with other projects to use more than one copyleft licence, particularly if the work contains different types of work. In particular, for liberated software which is put under a copyleft licence and contains other types of work, for example artwork or sounds, the relevant parts should also be put under a licence more suitable for those types of works, to make it easier to use them in other types of derivative works.
[edit] Practical restrictions
[edit] Digital format
Some creative works, particularly older ones, aren't available in a digital form (meaning that they can't be stored as one or more files on a computer), which makes it much harder to copy and modify them. Also, sometimes a work can be in digital form, but be restricted by only being available in a proprietary format, or with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology. Therefore, if they're not already, all liberated works must be made available in digital form, in a format which has open specifications and is unencumbered by patents, and without DRM restrictions.
[edit] Source data
In order to modify a creative work and make derivative works of it, it's often necessary for the 'source data' to be available, under the same legal terms as normal copies of the work. For all liberated software, the full corresponding source code must be available under the same legal terms as executable copies. For other types of works, it's harder to define what constitutes the source data, and what exactly is required to modify the work. As much as possible should be made available, though the decision about what source data must be released is left to the individual campaign organisers.
The source data for a particular work generally consists of whatever was required to produce and edit the work in the first place, and is in the format which would commonly be used to modify the work. As a rough guide, the source data for works other than software consists of:
- Audio - master recordings with separate files for each recorded part
- Video - separate image and sound files
- Images - the original editable file or files used to create it, if it was produced on a computer
- Text - no source material required
