Since 1996, FRAW has been the virtual home of The Free Range Network, ‘Rambinactivist’ Paul Mobbs, and other campaigns the site informally hosts content for.
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.
(C) Copyright 2021-2022 The Free Range Network; released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (Version 4 International).
Created: 6th February 2021;
Updated: 26th January 2022.
Length: ~600 words.
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Information about the intellectual property on the FRAW site
A discussion about the iniquities intellectual property rights
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3. © Copyright & 🄯 Copyleft on FRAW
4. Commercial/profit-making uses
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:
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.
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.