Location: FRAW Main index » Copyright

Copyright on the FRAW site

Wherever possible the information on this site is made available under free documentation licences.

That doesn't make it copyight free (or "anti-copyright" / @-copyight) – which would allow anyone to appropriate it and use for wholly different purposes. Instead the use of open licences allows copyright material to be made freely available under certain conditions. In general, you should assume that any inforamation on FRAW site is freely available for use on a non-commercial, attribution and share-alike basis. Each page should clearly state the copyright status so that you can use the material appropriately.

The free documentation licences we use on the FRAW site are:

• The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike licence (by-nc-sa), version 3 – this is the standard licence we utilise for much of the site content;
• The Gnu Free Documentation licence (GFDL), version 1.2 – this licence is used for certain documentation, usually developed as part of collaborative projects with other groups/organisations; and
• The Gnu Public licence (GPL), version 3 – this is the licence used for much of the code/tools made available on the site.

Click on the links above to obtain a copy of each licence.

The principal difference between these licences is that the GPL/GFDL allow commercial use of the information with the appropriate acknowledgement of the authors, whilst the CCNCSA does not allow commercial use in any form. Which of these two licences is adopted by the author of a particular document on this site is entirely their own choice.

Some activists use the @nticopyright label to release their information under. The problem with this is that it allows those who the activists campaign against to appripriate the information and use it against them. For this reason this site uses free documentation licences that use the law as a tool, to control the use of the information provided through the FRAW site, in order to prevent the undesirable commercial exploitation of our work.