Preamble:

With this Free Art License, you are authorised to copy, distribute and freely transform the work of art while respecting the rights of the originator.

Far from ignoring the author's rights, this license recognises them and protects them. It reformulates their principle while making it possible for the public to make creative use of the works of art. Whereas current literary and artistic property rights result in restriction of the public's access to works of art, the goal of the Free Art License is to encourage such access.

The intention is to make work accessible and to authorise the use of its resources by the greatest number of people: to use it in order to increase its use, to create new conditions for creation in order to multiply the possibilities of creation, while respecting the originators in according them recognition and defending their moral rights.

In fact, with the arrival of the digital age, the invention of the Internet and free software, a new approach to creation and production has made its appearance. It also encourages a continuation of the process of experimentation undertaken by many contemporary artists.

Knowledge and creativity are resources which, to be true to themselves, must remain free, i.e. remain a fundamental search which is not directly related to a concrete application. Creating means discovering the unknown, means inventing a reality without any heed to realism. Thus, the object(ive) of art is not equivalent to the finished and defined art object.
This is the basic aim of this Free Art License: to promote and protect artistic practice freed from the rules of the market economy.

Standard License

License your text under your terms. Our set of standard licenses will let you share text with viewers while protecting your writing from limits you put in place.

• Guide to adding Creative Commons to your existing website

Help Protect Your Rights to the Great Works in the Public Domain!
On October 7, 1998, both the House and the Senate passed S. 505, the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act" (CTEA), extending the already-too-long term of copyright protection by another 20 years. The legislation purports to cover even works already in existence -- a windfall gift to special interests of what rightfully belongs to the public. President Bill Clinton, a self-proclaimed supporter of the little guy, signed the bill on October 27, 1998. Like the Congress,  former President Clinton sold out the interests of the American people to a few owners of valuable copyrights from the 1920's and 1930's.   On January 15, 2003, the United States Supreme Court essentially disavowed its institutional obligation to interpret the Constitution to maintain the system of checks and balances set up by the Founding Fathers.  This web site shows how and why the congressional action and the Supreme Court's affirmance of it are tragic mistakes. 

This site also contains materials on the law and policy of longer copyright terms generally in the hope that, when this issue arises again (as it will, now that the Supreme Court has given Congress a carte blanche with respect to copyright, around the year 2015 or so), those seeking to defend the public interest will have some ammunition.

Everyone should be grateful to the efforts of Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was the lynchpin in the constitutional challenge, supplying immeasurable amounts of his time, money, and extraordinary talent to the cause.  Although the effort was ultimately unsuccessful, he succeeded in bringing the issue before the public, which I was wholly unable to do when the bill was being considered by Congress.   If we are vigilant, we MAY able to stop the rent-seeking special interests the next time they seek to line their own pockets at the expense of our cultural development.  Please visit Professor Lessig's web site for information and ideas about new approaches to promote the public domain in the light of this disastrous abdication of constitutional duty by the Supreme Court.

Public Knowledge - Lame Duck Alert: Tell Your Senators to Oppose " ...

Note that this is an essay about copyright myths. It assumes you know at least what copyright is
-- basically the legal exclusive
right of the author of a creative work to control the copying of that work. If you didn't know that,
check out a brief introduction to copyright

• Chris Sprigman's article THE MOUSE THAT ATE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: Disney, The Copyright Term Extension Act, And Eldred v. Ashcroft (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html)
• Copyright Research and Information center (http://www.cric.or.jp/cric_e/index.html) - about the copyright law in Japan
• MPEG video recordings of panel discussions from the Conference on the Public Domain (2001) (http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/mpegcast.html) panelists include Eben Moglen, Robin Gross and Lawrence Lessig
• Short list of uncopyrightable things in the U.S. (http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wnp)
• Summary list of copyright terms in other countries (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html#whatpd)
• Union for the Public Domain (http://www.public-domain.org)
• When U.S. works pass into the public domain (http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm).
• Creative Commons: some rights reserved (http://www.creativecommons.org)

Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons
and will launch on January 1, 2005.

The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier
for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual
property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright
and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.

The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is free software: the GNU system. (GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not UNIX; it is pronounced guh-noo.) Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the kernel Linux. Law/copyright/FAQ Index General information about copyrights Trademarks & Copyrights - Legal Encyclopedia - Nolo	What is Copyleft? Translations of the GPL Translations of the LGPL Translations of the GFDL Other Texts to Read Wikipedia:Copyright FAQ The Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ for questions on copyright.
Wikipedia's designated agentOCILLA under Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia as a source Wikipedia:Standard GFDL violation letter Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements Wikipedia:Spotting possible copyright violations	Further discussion... Wikipedia:Copyright issues m:Wikipedia and copyright issues m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia m:Permission grant extent