How to Liberate a Work

From Freedom Buyer

The system for liberating creative works using this wiki consists of raising funds to pay the copyright holder a one-off fee to remove certain legal and practical restrictions on its use, to allow people the freedom to copy and modify it. Please see the Criteria for Liberated Works page for more on what the legal and practical restrictions are which need to be removed, and how to do so.

Works to be targeted can be suggested and discussed on the Suggested Works page. Then, if anyone decides that a particular work is worth targeting and will receive enough support, they can start a campaign to liberate it, by creating a new page for it in the Targeted category. Please see below for how to do this. Anyone else who wants to join that campaign can then show their support by adding their name to the list of supporters on that page. That page can also be used to discuss the arrangements needed for the campaign to be successful, and certain details, such as the licence or licences which should be used for the work.

Then, the copyright holder needs to contacted. The aims of the campaign should explained, and they should be asked if they'll set a fee for which they'll agree to liberate the work under our terms. If they agree, and a price is set, a legal agreement must be made in which they agree to liberate the work as specified, if we pay them the fee they've set, by an agreed particular date. The best way to do can be discussed on the Legal page.

A pledge drive for the campaign should then be set up on Fundable, with the target amount set at the copyright holder's requested fee, plus a small amount, to account for administration fees from Fundable. The closing date of the pledge drive should be set to be close to the copyright holder's required date, but early enough to allow enough time to get the money to them. Then, pledges for the required amount simply need to received by Fundable for the campaign to be successful, otherwise it fails and the work isn't liberated. If a pledge drive is successful, arrangements then need to be made for the money to be transferred to the copyright holder, and for them to liberate the work as agreed.

Once the work has been successfully liberated, everyone who contributed funds to the pledge drive must be offered a copy of it under the new legal terms, with the practical restrictions having been removed. If possible, the new legal terms should apply to every copy already released, not just those distributed by the campaign organisers. This may or not be possible, and can be discussed on the Legal page. The campaign organisers should then upload a copy onto a website where it can be easily downloaded by anyone (preferably with an option to download it easily using peer-to-peer technology such as Bittorrent). Potential sites for this include:

• The Internet Archive, for most types of works
• Yotophoto and Flickr, for images
• Blip.tv, for short videos
• The Wikimedia Commons, for suitable types of works

For the liberation of a work to be successful, it's likely that a large number of fans of the work will need to be told about the campaign and this project, and persuaded to participate in it. This can be done by publicising it in the right places, and explaining how liberating the work will benefit them (see the About page).

It's more complicated to liberate a work if it's a derivative of another work, for example a film based on a book, and possibly a recording a song, due to possibly copyright issues. This can be discussed on the Legal page.

An exception to the use of the threshold pledge system could be if it's unnecessary, because the copyright holder decides to charge a very small fee to liberate the work, or none. That would mean that the campaign organisers could be willing to pay the whole fee between themselves, without the need for a pledge drive, or if no fee is required, they would just need to make the arrangements for the work to be liberated.

[edit] How to create a new page for a targeted work

A new page for a targeted work can be created by entering its name in the box below. The name of the page should be 'Targeted:', followed by the name of the work. For example, if the work was called 'Some Creative Work', the name of the page would be 'Targeted:Some Creative Work'. Please include capital letters in the correct places. The page should also be put into the Targeted category, by adding the text '[[Category:Targeted]]' at the bottom of the page.

There's an example of a page for a targeted work at Targeted:Example_Page.