The Free Range Activism Website

Copyright & Open Content on FRAW

These pages outlines our hostility to intellectual property rights, and our grudging acceptance of having to work within those concepts to provide content on-line.

Copyright & Open Licensing:
Information about the legal framework on FRAW

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3. © Copyright & 🄯 Copyleft on FRAW
4. Commercial/profit-making uses

© Copyright & 🄯 Copyleft on FRAW

This page outlines the copyright terms and the use of open licenses on the Free Range Activism Website. In general, wherever possible the information on this site is made available under free documentation licenses.

In the modern media environment copyright is a corporate illusion. Copyright, design and patent law puts legal power into the hands of the large corporations who have the economic power to use the law as a threat to the public. Ordinary people, however, due to the practical costs of launching any legal action for civil claims, let alone against a large corporation, have no such practical ability to protect their work.

Our use of copyright works within that reality. If we can't protect it, then we might as well share it – within certain legal guidelines that enable us to use infringement of our rights not as a mean of legal redress, but as an opportunity for campaigning and action. Some activists use the '@nticopyright' label to release their information. The problem is those who the activists campaign against are permitted to appropriate and use the information against them.

For this reason, since the the 1990s, the content of the FRAW site has been released under various ‘copyleft’ licenses. That doesn't make it ‘copyright free’ or ‘anti-copyright’ – which would allow anyone to appropriate it and use for wholly different purposes.

The use ‘open licenses’ allows our copyrighted material to be made freely available under certain conditions. In general, you should assume that any information on FRAW site is freely available for use on a non-commercial, attribution and share-alike basis, unless stated otherwise.

We've been releasing information under open licenses for over twenty years. The more ancient content of the site may be labelled as being issued under various versions of either the Creative Commons or GPL licenses. Currently, the open licenses used on the FRAW site are:

☮ The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 4.0 International license

Since the Creative Commons licence was updated to reflect the legal jurisdictions of different states, we've been using this license for on-line and hard-copy works since the early 2000s.

☮ GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3

This is the older free documentation license used on some of our works until the early 2000s.

☮ GNU General Public license (GPL), version 3

We use GPLv3 to license software works for reasons of compatibility with other free software projects.

Most of our works are licensed under the Creative Commons license. The exceptions are: works which we allow completely free use of, which are licensed under the GFDL; and software/script files which, for reasons of compatibility with other free software projects, we license under GPL.

The principal difference between these licenses is that the GPL/GFDL allow commercial use of the information with the appropriate acknowledgement of the authors, whilst the CC-NC-SA does not allow commercial use in any form.

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Commercial/profit-making uses

Just because we give things away doesn't mean we're not prepared to accept money for them!

If you wish to agree a non-exclusive license for the commercial use of our content, please get in touch.

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