The Transitioner's copyleft in a nutshell By editing or posting to this wiki, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under a Creative Commons Wiki 0.5 (beta) license, and you agree to waive attribution for your contributions with the understanding that copyrighted material made available from this wiki will be attributed to the wiki itself, namely "The Transitioner". Please link back to this site when giving attribution.

• Introduction
• The problem of copyright
• The Public Domain
• The Copyright
• The Copyleft
  • The Creative Commons
• Creative Commons for The Transitioner?
  • Why?
  • Which one exactly?
• Epilog

Introduction

The Transitioner wants to take responsibility by being open for everyone to get involved in communicating with anyone else for building a collective conscience for the benefit of everyone! (see TheTransitioner Copyright status)

TheTransitioner is a public space where participants can collectively build knowledge, projects, intentions, tools, etc... '<please add your associations here>''!
This sentence ends intentionally at this point - because when you read it with some thought, you will recognize, that collective knowledge will do the trick...

So, can't the knowledge of The Transitioner be misused?!?

The problem of copyright

Most of you already thought of copyrights. Probably you haven't done it intentionally, but you might have thought of

• "Do I have to pay license fees for performing my favourite song?!?"
• "When I have thought of something, can it be stolen from me!?"
• and so on..

Well, basically knowledge is free! In germany there is a nice song about that (and probably that's known elsewhere, too). The basic idea of this song reaches back to the 12th century and this actual wording is taken from flyers from around 1780-1800:

Die Gedanken sind frei	The Thoughts, they are free
keiner kann sie erraten	no one can guess them
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen,	no human know them,
kein Jäger erschießen.	no hunter shoot them.
Es bleibet dabei:	It stays like that:
Die Gedanken sind frei!	The thoughts, they are free!

And as a matter of fact knowledge can only do good, when it is free! If you restrict knowledge to a certain circle of people, then it becomes a restriction to evolution. If you open it up for everyone, then it becomes powerful! Knowledge is a weird thing - it can be reproduced with just a marginal cost! Can you do that with a chair?

So you just let it go, right? Well, with todays legislation, that sadly is not that a trivial thing....

The Public Domain

Of everything you creatively create you have the copyright! That basically means, that it is your personal child and you can decide, what happens to it!

So now you can think of the previous paragraph and say: "Well, it is better that knowledge belongs to everyone! I just set it free!" And with that you sign off any rights to the material. You allow other people to claim, that they invented it; you allow other people to say, that it's their child - and even more: handle it just like it is their child! If you are such a free person - well, good for you! But what about your child?

The Copyright

As already said the ownership of the copyright allows you to do anything with your work, for example license it. And that's what is usually done! Record companies own the childs of artists, to preserve 'their' rights. Movie studios own the rights to the movies they produced. Publishers hold the rights for a book and so on... So you are very secure about people using the material you created! You can just sue anyone about using your material and that's a good thing, because you can get money out of it! Period!
But wait - hasn't The Transitioner another mission...?

The Copyleft

Well, the collective ownership of knowledge is no new idea. Actually the personalized ownership of knowledge is a new idea - introduced by 'modern' legislation including patents and codified rules for copyright. This whole problem became very aware to one certain guy, when he wasn't able to get his printer working. He just wasn't allowed to do it - because of the copyright to the printer drivers. So he invented an inversed copyright - the copyleft! Yes, we talk about Richard Stallman and the GNU Project incarnated in the Free Software Foundation.

As already said, ownership of knowledge lets you do anything with it, e.g. license it! Richard Stallman thought of a license that allows anyone to do with the knowledge, whatever he wants, as long as this person shares any knowledge he gathers from that under the same license. Yes, that is possible! And that has been done! The world changing power of Linux is based on that principle! Richard Stallman has thought of software and he thinks, that your software should grant you these freedoms:

1. to run for any purpose
2. to study and adapt to your needs
3. to redistribute, so you can help others
4. to release improvements, so everyone benefits

So the GPL was born. It is a license, freely available to anybody, who wants to use it. It is a license that grants those four freedoms and on which the power of software like Linux builds upon.
This proved to be a mighty concept in the digital, networked world! And to the believe of certain people (called Hackers), this is the only way to got, to build a sustainable future!

The Creative Commons

The Creative Commons enlarge this concept beyond the realm of software to any kind of intellectual property. The Creative Commons is - just like the FSF - a nonprofit offering copyright licenses for free use to anybody. Creative Commons licenses are based on several attributes you can combine as long as it is logical:

• Attribution
• NoDerivs
• NonCommercial
• ShareAlike

Creative Commons licenses are being developed continuously, at the time of this writing being at version 2.5. They are also always modified to the legislation of different countries, so that you can be pretty sure to be able to claim your rights around the world.

Creative Commons for The Transitioner?

So now you reached the part you wanted to know of, right? ;)
The Transitioner goes with a Creative Commons license.

Why?

• they are made for content like the one in The Transitioner
• they are being adjusted for different countries' legislation
• you get a 'human readable summary' of the license, so that non-juristic-savvy people can understand, what they may and may not do - Example for Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
• Creative Commons provides RDF-Metadata, which is actually used - see: Creative Commons search engine

Which one exactly?

Well, the most recent evolution of Creative Commons licenses looks really good for the purpose of The Transitioner! We are talking here about the Creative Commons Wiki license. It is a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license specially designed for Wikis. Wikis have a common licensing problem: Anybody can contribute to them - and so everybody has to be named, when copying the content under a ShareAlike license! The Wiki-license allows for specifying a certain party, which is sufficient to be named in case of copying content of the wiki. In the case of this wiki 'The Transitioner' is this special party! So anyone copying content off this website can choose to:

• name everyone, who has ever contibuted or
• name 'The Transitioner'

and on the other hand everyone contributing to this webiste

• signs off the explicit right to be named

The Creative Commons Wiki-license is still in beta! It's current version is 0.5! But it is a very promising license for purposes like the one of The Transitioner. Adopting further versions shouldn't be any problem - so if you feel confident with the general concept of it, you can feel pretty safe for the future. The most prominent example fo usage of this license is probably Lawrence Lessig himself using it for the overhaul of his Code book.

Epilog

If you feel that The Transitioner should have another license SHOUT HERE!!!

If you feel, that the Copyleft concept has to evolve, please go to the Creative Commons and join the discussion!

From jf: well, here's my 2 cents feedback... I just love the CC wiki license, it deserves support even if it is still at the experimental stage. Soooo, I would GO FOR IT!!! Thanks a lot, Amette, to bring this out!

Hi Jean-Francois and all! Please hear my shout! Please consider placing your wiki in the Public Domain. My belief and my experience is that the Public Domain is what truly encourage us to share content and to care for it. As you write: In the social field, I have made the choice to live in the gift economy, i.e. neither to sell nor make my property of anything that belongs to the commons. This includes any sort of knowledge, wisdom, my own thoughts, work, time, expertise, papers, etc. I make my living from the shared fruits that come back. But Creative Commons is a form of copyright which therefore requires licenses to be tracked. This makes it very impractical to share content for the purpose of encouraging social networking. I do want other people to help me raise my child, so I don't want to be strict as to who owns my child. And I don't plan to sue anybody, but that doesn't mean that I won't pursue ethical actions to defend my child from slander or misuse. That is why I have set up the Ethical Public Domain http://www.ethicalpublicdomain.org Please consider supporting this approach by placing your content in the Public Domain!