Open content

Open content is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify freely, without asking for permission. The term evokes the related concept of open-source software. Such content is said to be under an open licence. The concept of applying free software licenses to content was introduced by Michael Stutz, who in 1994 wrote the paper 'Applying Copyleft to Non-Software Information' for the GNU Project. The term 'open content' was coined by David A. Wiley in 1998 and evangelized via the Open Content Project, describing works licensed under the Open Content License (a non-free share-alike license, see 'Free content' below) and other works licensed under similar terms. It has since come to describe a broader class of content without conventional copyright restrictions. The openness of content can be assessed under the '5Rs Framework' based on the extent to which it can be reused, revised, remixed and redistributed by members of the public without violating copyright law. Unlike free content and content under open-source licenses, there is no clear threshold that a work must reach to qualify as 'open content'. Although open content has been described as a counterbalance to copyright, open content licenses rely on a copyright holder's power to license their work, similarly as copyleft which also utilizes copyright for such a purpose. In 2003 Wiley announced that the Open Content Project has been succeeded by Creative Commons and their licenses, where he joined as 'Director of Educational Licenses'. In 2006 the Creative Commons' successor project was the Definition of Free Cultural Works for free content, put forth by Erik Möller, Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Benjamin Mako Hill, Angela Beesley, and others. The Definition of Free Cultural Works is used by the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2008, the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons licenses were marked as 'Approved for Free Cultural Works' among other licenses. Another successor project is the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), founded by Rufus Pollock in Cambridge, UK in 2004 as a global non-profit network to promote and share open content and data. In 2007 the Open Knowledge Foundation gave an Open Knowledge Definition for 'Content such as music, films, books; Data be it scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise; Government and other administrative information'. In October 2014 with version 2.0 Open Works and Open Licenses were defined and 'open' is described as synonymous to the definitions of open/free in the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works. A distinct difference is the focus given to the public domain and that it focuses also on the accessibility ('open access') and the readability ('open formats'). Among several conformant licenses, six are recommended, three own (Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL), Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY), Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)) and the CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0 creative commons licenses. The OpenContent website once defined OpenContent as 'freely available for modification, use and redistribution under a license similar to those used by the open-source / free software community'. However, such a definition would exclude the Open Content License (OPL) because that license forbade charging 'a fee for the itself', a right required by free and open-source software licenses.