JumboSizedFish
Frequently and Likely Asked Questions

This section focuses on clarifications and answers to specific positions.

What is the public domain? (Back)

The "public domain" is a body of works (such as books, music, movies, inventions, and software) that aren't copyrighted, patented, or trademarked, so anyone can freely use, copy, share, and adapt them without needing to get permission or pay royalties.

A creative work enters the public domain if:

1. The copyright(s), patent(s), and trademark(s) on it expired;
2. The copyright on it was not properly registered, claimed, or renewed;
3. It was never eligible for copyright, such as not being sufficiently creative; or
4. Its author intentionally released it to the public domain.

What is copyfree? (Back)

Copyfree is a licensing policy and philosophy about maximizing personal freedom with a creative work. It's in contrast to copyright and copyleft, as it doesn't grant the author exclusive rights over a work nor does it control how others can distribute their adaptions.

It is a specific classification of a permissive or non-copyleft public license:

1. Free Use: A copyfree license does not place any restrictions on the use of the licensed material, and protects recipients of the material from such restrictions except insofar as explicit individual contractual agreements are concerned.
2. Free Distribution: A copyfree license does not place any restrictions on the distribution of the licensed material except regarding the license itself, and protects recipients of the material from such restrictions except insofar as explicit individual contractual agreements are concerned.
3. Free Modification and Derivation: A copyfree license does not place any restrictions on the modification of — and derivation from — the licensed material external to the license itself, and protects recipients of the material from such restrictions except insofar as explicit individual contractual agreements may be concerned.
4. Free Combination: A copyfree license does not place any restrictions on materials outside of the licensed work itself, nor does it explicitly limit the licensed work in combination with materials external to the licensed work.
5. Universal Application: A copyfree license does not place any restrictions on who benefits from the terms of the licensed material, except in the event it specifies provisions to revoke its terms for those found to have violated the copyfree protections of the license. The license is also applicable to recipients of the material distributed under its terms without requiring the execution of any additional license by the distributing and receiving parties.

Business Advantage

What most people would probably consider a "traditional" creative business model is embodied in a number of industries dominated by large, centralized, corporate distribution networks, such as major book publishers, MPAA member film studios, and RIAA member record companies. What economists would describe as "artificial scarcity" is created and enforced via copyright laws, and these industries make use of that to generate revenue by selling physical and digital media and prohibiting others from selling them in competition with the copyright-dependent distributors.

These distributors have long been regarded as necessary for commercial success, as superstars such as Metallica and Stephen King would not have reached as wide an audience without national and even international marketing and distribution provided by the industry dominating distributors. The vast majority of creators in such industries saw little of their royalties or other unit sales income, however, and either made a more modest living through more personal interaction with consumers (e.g. touring for bands) or by maintaining a dayjob alongside their creative work. The commercial benefits of widespread distribution mostly applied only to the distributors, leaving many producers of creative works to make what money they could in much the same way that itinerant actors, musicians, puppeteers, and storytellers did centuries ago.

The business landscape is changing, however. The fact that the cost of copying and distributing a digital representation of a work is plummeting to effectively zero undermines the major distributors' business model as many consumers of new works actually find it in some ways more technically difficult to avoid sharing copies of what they possess than to (often unintentionally) violate the restrictions of copyright law. While some complain that this is destroying the profitability of industry business models for creators and distributors, others embrace this as providing the ability to bypass the industry gatekeepers to distribute and market their works essentially for free, enlisting the filesharing fanbase as a replacement for those corporate distributors.

Whether you believe that copyright violation by fans is wrong, the truth is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to halt such informal filesharing, with no end in sight to the increasing ease, frequency, and ubiquity of filesharing. For the independent creator, whose biggest concern is usually obscurity rather than "piracy", the best way to address filesharing is to use it as leverage to reach a wider audience and employ business models that benefit from rampant filesharing rather than depending on the apparently impossible task of stopping it.

Cultural Persistence

The durability of culture is an important concern. There are many film, magnetic, and digital archives of cultural works that are vulnerable to loss due to a combination of copyright restrictions and low perceived commercial value. The extent to which a cultural work is kept to a small, restricted state of archives, it is vulnerable to loss due to digital storage failure, fires and floods, and the occasional negligence of caretakers, among other problems. Indeed, even the cost of maintaining an archive can induce a caretaker — often the copyright holder, when a work is not considered currently commercially viable — to intentionally delete or destroy archives of cultural works.

Simple acts like sharing freely downloadable digital archives over the Internet, with no notable restrictions on copying and redistributing in any form, can significantly mitigate the danger of loss for many cultural works. In fact, it puts most of the cost of (potentially endless) archive duplication in the hands of people who simply want a copy of works in the archive, who will gladly pay the tiny costs involved.

Allowing cultural works to decay and disappear does a disservice to the general public, to historians, to creative people who might draw inspiration from those works, and to the legacies and sometimes even livelihoods of the people who contributed to the creations of those works in the first place. Authors of cultural works can see entire legacies vanish forever if, as is the case in most copyright-heavy industries, the copyrights of their works end up in the hands of corporate distributors whose only interest in the works is their short-term commercial viability; it is ironically, in the face of distributors' arguments based on the supposed needs of artists and authors, a fact that artists and authors are harmed by perpetual enforcement of strict copyright terms for their works when archives of those works are allowed to perish, taking the artists' and authors' legacies to the grave with them.

What is free and open-source software? (Back)

A piece of software is free and open-source if users have the rights (typically granted from a public license) to use, study, modify, and distribute it and its source code for any purpose.

• A program is free — as in freedom, not necessarily price — if it grants users the "four essential freedoms:"
  0. To run it as you wish and for any purpose;
  1. To study how it works, and to change it so it does what you wish;
  2. To redistribute copies of it; and
  3. To distribute your modifications.
  • Access to the source code is a precondition for Freedoms 1 and 3.
• Mere access to source code just makes a program "source-available;" in order for it to be open-source:
  1. Its license shall not restrict anyone from giving away or selling it as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources without royalties or fees;
  2. Its source code must be publicly available and reasonably obtainable, and its license must allow distribution of the program in source and compiled form;
  3. Its license must allow modifications and derived works, and for them to be distributed under the same terms of the original software;
  4. Its license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code, but it may restrict distribution of modified source code, provided that it allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code that modifies the program at build time; and it may require derived works to carry a different name or version number to differentiate it from the original software;
  5. Its license must not discriminate against any person or group;
  6. Its license must not discriminate on the basis of endeavor;
  7. Its license must apply to all recipients of the program without the need to execute additional terms set by redistributors;
  8. Its license must not depend on the program being part of a particular software distribution;
  9. Its license must not place restrictions on other software distributed along with the licensed software; and
  10. No provisions of its license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

Given that both the free software and the open-source software movements have some philosophical differences, a program can be either free or open-source.