It’s called, Freedom. It’s kind of funny because you’d think it’s an add-on module but it’s actually a core part of the game’s storyline. Yes, there’s tension with it, but that’s the beauty of it. Even in the game, Freedom isn’t free. There are costs, dangers to unrestricted creativity.  That’s why there’s a ruleset — to help keep everyone considerate, playing nice. It mandates… discipline. That’s the tricky part. Because discipline is important in helping players gain experience points, really mature as players. But if they’re not using the Freedom that comes with the game, then the game’s reduced to discipline for its own sake. Ouraboros. The snake devours its own tale. All the Freedom to imagine, create, share, and improve is swallowed up in an ocean of elite pedantry.

Image: Pharaoh's Imagination by Aharon Varady (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Don’t you remember? The story of our gaming ancestors, slaving under a wicked dungeon master, Pharaoh? Some game masters let it go to their head. Just because they’re the storyteller, they think they’re writing the story. They’re not. The game — it’s a collaborative adventure. The story is all around us… we’re part of the telling. The game is about trying to make it a happily ever after story, after all. Because, you know, that’s not guaranteed. There’s more than one possible ending.

So what happened? A frustrated gamer, Moshe, figures out his fellow players are trapped in a game loop engineered by Pharaoh. This realization frees him but not his fellow players, so he runs. Far. He explores the edge of the gameworld, the place called Midbar. Where speech comes from. Where undeveloped narratives spawn endlessly, a grazing pasture for flocks and imaginations. There, Moshe discovers an anomaly, a fire burning but not consuming a small bush. Is it a bug in the game? He takes a closer look. Then suddenly, the story goes meta. There’s a storyteller narrating the story he’s living, the story Pharaoh thinks he’s telling. The Storyteller reveals to Moshe the key to unlocking the level. It seems risky. Fellow players are skeptical. But the key to breaking the level is… you guessed it: Freedom. Freedom to leave the rules of the wicked, game master Pharaoh behind for just one high-carb, community celebrating weekend of Freedom – a GameCon in the magical Midbar. A change of perspective, a taste of freedom to expand your mind.

And so the story went. Denied Freedom for one weekend, the Storyteller intervenes, helps defeat the boss, break the level. The players are finally free from Pharaoh, but still imprisoned by old, poor gaming habits and player expectations. The players were undisciplined… a mess. They kind of liked the familiar structure of Pharaoh’s simple rules, despite their inability to innovate and improve their game, grow their characters. So, the Storyteller sets Moshe up as a new game master to teach a new way of playing. He explains three new game challenges to refine their player characters and explore their potential with Freedom: Manna, an single person game exercising responsibility in gathering one’s own ephemeral food resources, ethically. Shabbat, a single/multi-player game preparing a castle in Time to rest, reboot, and reflect on one’s creative potential. Mishkan, a multi-player game constructing a castle in Space for everyone to collaborate and share with one another all they were inspired to create with their new-found Freedom.

Freedom. It saves us. It rescues our intentions from being enslaved to someone else’s narrative. It liberates our creative imagination – the oxygen we breathe. Freedom. It saves gaming communities from even the best game’s two worst tendencies: 1) to limit creativity out of a feared loss in overall game quality, correct play, and authentic game experience, and 2) to require such complex obedience that play is limited to elite code mavens and robots.

But nowadays, Freedom in the game has been so diminished by a lack of creative engagement that many players don’t even realize they’re playing a game, even when someone gets hurt. There are those who walk away from the game, and embarrassed they know little besides the game’s rules and its discipline, simply despise it. There are those who loosely identify with the game, but who don’t know or don’t care to play it out of ignorance for its rules. Some fear the game will alienate them from their innate creative selves. Others know the game’s story as observers, cheerleaders, critics, but rarely as participants. Some mistake the game for a meta-game dedicated to the survival of the community of gamers – and have little invested in the game itself. They all enjoy Freedom outside the game, knowing little to nothing of Freedom within it.

And then there are those who are dedicated, serious players. They play the game happily, decorating their play, making their every move a thing of beauty. And some through their passion will choose or craft a different, even esoteric, edition of the game’s rulesets. Tension between gamers playing with forked rulesets is a familiar problem in a lot of games. Usually, serious players have really good perspectives and abilities they’ve honed in each of their particular communities. When players with divergent experiences, priorities, and values develop their own rules for playing together, they usually develop respect for one another and realize with joy they have a lot to learn from one another. They enrich each others game immeasurably. That master gamer, BZ of Mah Rabu, talks about it in his Hilkhot Pluralism. The key is making a space, a Maqom, where gamers are free to share. See? Freedom. It redeems the game from it’s own self-destructive tendencies.

A maqom — a holy space — for sharing? The Open Siddur Project, now, that’s what I’m talking about. Here’s an example of a space for free sharing of inspired creativity, a mishkan built out of inspired creativity, cultivated and maintained over the Internet. Where all your spell books, game maps and modules – in any languages ever used for the game –- can be used with the game. Gamers can adopt, adapt, and redistribute what they’ve modified. Everyone sharing has given their permission to do that upfront. See? Lo tignov –- no stealing. Sharing! Everyone appreciates each others creativity, their desire to contribute. It follows the game rule: Gemilut Ḥassadim — act with loving-kindness.

The Open Siddur Project’s already started sharing via their website. Yeah, their application is pre-Alpha, 0.4.1. But when it hits 1.0 it will be kick-ass! And because the code for their platform and toolkit is open source (with an LGPL license), other gamers can build on their work, and all that creative investment can be reused, recycled. It follows the game rule: bal tashchit — never waste! Never fail to appreciate the hard work invested in another’s craft and creation.

See, there will always be little pharaohs looking to pwn the Game. To lock it down, make it their own, proprietary gold farm. A black box, closed to innovation, perhaps even to inspection. It’s happened before. When the inner workings of the game become so hard to understand that only an elite can game it. When gamers forget they are playing it willingly, you know, to grow, because it’s fun, imaginative, creative.

Theoretically, it should be hard to pwn the Game. It’s a role-playing game –- open ended. There are no winners. But there are surely losers –- if the bar to playing it well is set to high. If players can’t own their experience, engage their innate creative and emotional intelligence in it. You know, what some folks call spirituality. For those who feel that the price of Freedom is the loss of an authentic game experience, then the consequence will be an increasingly oppressive and dangerous game experience. Ultimately, creativity is deadened, imagination defeated. Gamers minds enslaved within the prison of a Pharaoh’s imagination. Their’s is a mentality of mitzrayim – constriction.

Creative Commons By Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)	Share your work under the condition that all future derivative works correctly credit you and attribute your original work. All derivative works must be shared with this same license. The CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license is an internationally applicable, remix friendly, free/libre compatible, copyleft.
Creative Commons By Attribution (CC BY)	Share your work under the condition that any first generation derivative work correctly credit you and attribute your original work. The CC-BY 3.0 Unported license is internationally applicable and remix friendly with content shared under other free/libre licenses.
Creative Commons Zero (CC0)	Share your work without any conditions. The CC0 is a Public Domain dedication.

The Open Siddur Project and other like minded projects that believe in free-as-in-libre culture, make sure to protect the freedoms of their contributing users. They ask them to preserve their intent to keep their work free for creative reuse by choosing any one of three complementary licenses appropriate to the type of content shared and their desire for credit and correct attribution in derivative works.

For example, an internationally recognized license, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0 Unported license, uses Copyright Law to legally protect a creator’s intention to share their work, ensuring it remains open instead of closed, to keep it free for creative reuse instead of for proprietary exploitation, and to “Share Alike” – requiring all derivative works to properly attribute the original work, and credit the original creator. Significantly, the license allows the work to be used commercially, even as the work remains free for creative reuse. This freedom permits the work to truly be free — unchained — and be disseminated and remixed within the vast ocean of creative work available to human imagination. Another license, the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 Unported license, requires attribution but permits creators of derivative works to choose their own license. A third license, Creative Commons Zero (CC0) empowers a creator to take their work out of the domain of Copyright and dedicate their work to the Public Domain where anyone can use it in a derivative work however they like with none of the obligations to attribute or “Share Alike.”

To grow and remain healthy, collaborative projects need to be open for inspection and free for creative innovation. Growing, just as symbiotic organisms grow. Healthy, just as non-parasitic organisms sustain themselves – by creating energy and opportunities for others in their ecosystem. In this game, the opportunities we create are the product of our creative engagement. In our creative ecosystem, everything and everyone builds on each others work.

Free/libre licenses are crucial because under Copyright Law, everything created is closed and proprietary by default. In short, the law makes a Pharaoh out of each of us, whether we want to be or not. It makes sense when we need a monopoly over creative work we do not want others to share, modify, and redistribute. But keeping creative work closed and proprietary is counterproductive for collaborative projects: like games, or religions.

Take a work out of the creative cycle today and one almost guarantees its obscurity as an orphaned work. Those not shared with free-as-in-libre licenses must endure two human lifetimes before they can be creatively reused. Under Copyright Law, everything we create is taken out of the cycle for our entire lives plus 70 years (or 95 years for corporations). How does that help make for creative collaboration in a living breathing community? It doesn’t. Those naïve pharaohs who hope their work will be adopted for communal use but who refuse the Freedom of gaming communities and players to adapt it, are deluding themselves. They truly don’t know the Name of the Game. By forgetting to value Freedom, creativity, and collaboration, they undermine the game itself.

What am I saying? Heresy? Heaven forfend. Do I look like a game master? No, I’m a player character, all the way. Not that I find it easy to find a good game master these days. To game well, I read books, manuals, zines, blogs – and try to build good lasting relationships with my fellow gamers. I’ve been finding more and more players who play because they are passionate about the game and not because they’re slaves to it. But I digress. All I’m saying is, we can do this. We can play this game.

Which of the above Creative Commons licensing option conflicts with the entire copyleft and free/libre license ecosystem? (Image by Aharon Varady, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

The Jewish digital media community is young. Welcome to it! Those of you who are posting and innovating now are the trend-setters for the near-term. In addition, as long as the material you and your “students” produce remains relevant, the length of the copyright term will ensure that licensing restrictions placed on your data now last well beyond your lifetime, The community will learn, and I hope to convince you that the non-commercial (NC) term of use sets a dangerous precedent going forward.

The community is currently undergoing a transition from resources that are simply “free as in beer” (do not cost money to download and use) but place restrictions on what can be done with their content (examples here) to resources that recognize the educational and cultural value of remixing. The educational arguments in favor of remixability are remarkably similar to the philosophy of free culture, although they differ in focus. Our community, however, has not yet fully embraced the values of user freedom, and is subject to the confusion created by the choice offered in the spectrum of rights that Creative Commons licenses offer. The Creative Commons brand is recognized, but the differences in terms between the various licenses are not, leading to unhelpful suggestions like “use a Creative Commons license,” without specification of which one. While Creative Commons uses a logo to distinguish its free licenses from its non-free licenses, the brand name itself is still more recognizable than this logo.

One argument that I have heard promoting the use of the non-commercial term is the fear of a larger bogeyman. The identity of this bogeyman differs depending on who is making the argument. For content developers, the bogeyman is often a large publishing house. The new media entrepreneur worries that a larger publishing house will either take their free data and undercut their price or sell their free data without returning anything to its source.

This argument does not distinguish between two types of relationships with commercial entities: simple “commercial use” and “exploitation.” The free culture community answers the exploitation argument by proposing copyleft, also known as ShareAlike. Under copyleft licenses, any derived works of the original work must be released under the same terms as the original. What was once free remains free. The large publishing house bogeyman who publishes a copylefted work must allow the person who received the work to copy, modify, sell, and create derivative works of your work, just like any other user. Their intellectual improvements to the work can therefore be reincorporated into the original, diluting any advantage of the large publishing house’s version aside from the unique value added by their version (such as the fact that it’s a physical bound copy). In addition to the optional copyleft, all Creative Commons licenses except for the “Creative Commons Zero” (CC0) public domain declaration have anti-DRM clauses that prohibit adding digital rights/restrictions management that disallow users from exercising their rights under the license, so a third party is prevented from Tivo-izing your material.

Further, publishing houses that make use of your data can become your supporters. If your project provides them with useful data now, you will likely be able to provide them with useful data in the future, forming symbiotic relationships between publishers and content creators and aggregators.

Non-commercial use restrictions are particularly dangerous in combination with the ShareAlike term, as is the case in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license. The reason is that the ShareAlike term ensures that derivative works are released under the same terms as the original. Overuse of the CC-BY-NC-SA license will result in two copyleft ghettos that cannot be mixed with each other: one that allows commercial use and one that does not. The existence of the non-commercial partially-free ghetto can only lead to duplication of effort and waste, both by commercial and non-commercial entities.

Don't make your copyleft, copywrong. License with a CC-BY-SA license instead of the CC-BY-NC-SA (Image by Aharon Varady, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.)

One proposed resolution to the varying interpretations of the NC term is for the creator to spell out what is expected. MIT OpenCourseWare is one such example of a well thought out model. However, even this liberal interpretation of the NC term blocks innovation and remixability by a large class of users for purposes which provide for the social good but involve an exchange of money beyond at-cost.

The real difference between MIT’s model and the model of many free resources in the Jewish community is that, it seems to me, MIT intends not to limit commercial use, but to reserve rights to commercial use. MIT is acting as a distributor for a collective of a relatively small number of copyright holders (the faculty) who themselves may have outside commercial interests in the material. Because only a few are involved and they are easily found, the NC license invites commercial users to obtain a separate licensing agreement for commercial publication. The NC term is creating a permission culture for commercial use of the work that is separate from the (semi-)free culture of its non-commercial use. Many content creators and aggregators in the Jewish community have no commercial interest in the work, which requires a different thought process from an entity that wants to reserve commercial rights.

A community-driven project that uses an NC term is in an even harder position. Not only is it content-incompatible with truly free resources, including Wikipedia, but it is also limited in what it in itself can do with derivative works of its own creation, once it has accepted a contribution from an outside contributor under the NC terms. For community-created works, there is no single author with whom to negotiate.

Further confusion is generated by the equation in many previous “free” resources of “non-profit” with “non-commercial.” With the advent of new business models, the lines between various entities with social purpose are increasingly blurred. This is the era of the “social enterprise.” While traditional non-profits rely on grants and donations to ensure their continued functioning, many social enterprises prefer to ensure their future sustainability by offering products on the market that help their social mission. A no-commercial use copyright term prevents these enterprises from transacting business with your data unless they negotiate separate terms as described above.

Whatever your form of legal incorporation (if any), it is hard to argue that you have envisioned 100% of the uses of your data from now until 70 years after your death. By blocking commercial use of materials, an entire group of social enterprises has been cut off from any use of your data, no matter how innovative.

For the reasons outlined above, I urge you to avoid licenses that restrict commercial use. If you are worried about exploitation, choose a license with a copyleft (ShareAlike) term.

In Pirkei Avot,^[1] Rabi Yehoshua ben Levi teaches that the 48th quality of the 48 qualities defining excellent students is they should correctly attribute the source of their knowledge.^[2] Failing to do so threatens to “dissolve the world.” In the rabbinic understanding of cosmogony, creation itself is the product of exegesis. In Genesis Rabbah, the Creator looked into the Torah to create the world. The process of exegesis, requires attribution, and so without correct attribution by the Creator to the Torah, the product of the exegesis — the universe — dissolves. The importance of attribution doesn’t get any more tachlis (fundamental) than that.

Rabi Yehoshua ben Levi proceeds to exemplify this teaching by attributing the 48th quality to Queen Esther who in the second chapter of the Scroll of Esther, verse 21, foils the coup de tat of Bightan and Teresh — by relaying warning of the coup to King Aḥashverosh in the name of Mordeḥai. Had Mordeḥai not been correctly credited with notifying the king of the murderous plot, he would not have received his belated thanks in chapter 6,^[3] and Haman would not have endured the embarrassment that presages his downfall. A long chain of events connects the seemingly insignificant action of Queen Esther to the salvation of the Jewish people. The implicit lesson is that our everyday actions matter. The explicit message is that it behooves us to act correctly, especially in regards to attribution of credit.

In the world of academic scholarship, correct attribution is a fundamental ethic. Ignoring it would quickly tear apart the tower of intellect upon which the babel of human knowledge ascends to heaven. The need for correct attribution is of course, no less in new and creative Jewish works. Whether you’re making a translation in a source sheet for a lecture or shir, designing a Hebrew font, crafting your very own siddur, or developing software that helps others craft their own siddur, it behooves you to correctly attribute any sources included in your work or from which your work derives.

The need for correct attribution is widespread and that is one important reason why a requirement for correct attribution is now enshrined in a set of legally binding licenses which creators use to share their work in the world and over the Internet. The significance of these licenses is that by enshrining language assuring attribution, they help to promote sharing. And sharing is of fundamental importance to receiving Torah. As the Gerrer Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, teaches in his Sfas Emes in his d’var torah on Parshat Terumah:

The Midrash Tanḥuma quotes: “I have given you good lekaḥ (teaching)” (Proverbs 4:2). [Lekaḥ can also refer to something acquired by purchase.] It then offers a parable of two merchants, one who has silk and the other peppers. Once they exchange their goods, each is again deprived of that which the other has. But if there are two scholars, one who has mastered the Order of Seeds and the other who knows the Order of Festivals, once they teach each other, each has both orders.

The point is that each one of Israel has a particular portion within Torah, yet it is also Torah that joins all our souls together. That is why Torah is called “perfect, restoring the soul” (Psalms 19:8). We become one through the power of Torah; it is “an inheritance of the assembly of Yaakov” (Deuteronomy 33:4). We receive from one another the distinctive viewpoint that belongs to each of us.^[4]

This is an important lesson to learn. However, when a new work is created, the law doesn’t assume that work was intended for sharing with attribution. Instead, that work is immediately protected as private property — not only for the lifetime of the creator, but also for 70 years after their death^[5] — כֹּל זְכוּיוֺת שוֺמְרוֺת, Kol zchuyot shomrot, all rights reserved — to reproduce, distribute, and create derivative works based on it are forbidden, without the explicit written consent of the creator. As stated before here at the Open Siddur Project, this might make sense for creators of new works and music, but it hardly makes sense for cultural projects with communal objectives which rely heavily and assert their authority on the authenticity of works in the Public Domain. The teaching and practice of Judaism is one such communal project. The promise of the Open Siddur Project relies on our sharing creative works and access to the vast corpus of work that we’ve inherited from our creative ancestors. That is why we so heavily depend and advocate for the adoption of open source, free/libre, and copyleft^[6] licenses — so that creative work, protected by default under Copyright law, can nevertheless be shared by creators who give their explicit permission to others to adopt, adapt, study, and attribute their work in new works that are similarly shared and distributed.

To help creators of new works navigate the panoply of free/libre, open source, and copyleft licenses, I made a decision tree flowchart as an image map with clickable links to respective licenses and relevant articles. The tree was inspired by a decision tree by Terry Hancock, which accompanied his article, “Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works.”^[7] Readers of this article are recommended to read Hancock’s follow-up essay, “Confusion and Complexity: High time to prune the Creative Commons licenses?“

The oldest complete manuscript of the TaNaKh is the Leningrad Codex (circa 1008 CE) prepared by the school of Aharon Ben Moshe Ben Asher. The grand project of Masoretes during the first millenia was preparing the text of the TaNaKh with their received tradition (masorah) of its annunciation and vocalization. Since these important oral traditions are not transcribed within Torah scrolls, the Masoretes preserved these traditions by writing out the complete text of the TaNaKh with vowels (nikkud) and cantillation marks (trope). The Tiberian system for marking vowels in the Leningrad Codex is the same system used in Hebrew today.

According to modern scholars, Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher followed the Karaite rather than the Rabbinic tradition of Judaism. This may help explain why Aharon ben Asher’s contemporary, Rav Saadia Gaon (892-942 CE) preferred the codexes of another Masoretic school — that of Ben-Naphtali. However, only the codexes of the Ben-Asher school survived, and ultimately, the codexes of the Ben-Asher school were approved by Maimonides (1135-1204 CE). In his Yad ha-Ḥazakah, Maimonides writes:

All relied on it, since it was corrected by Ben-Asher and was worked on and analyzed by him for many years, and was proofread many times in accordance with the masorah, and I based myself on this manuscript in the Sefer Torah that I wrote”.^[5]

This approval is all the more astounding considering Maimonides outstanding objections and disputations with the Karaites of his day.

In the 1830s, Abraham ben Samuel Firkovich, a manuscript collector and ḥakham of the Crimean Karaite Jewish community, visited Constantinople, Jerusalem, and the Cairo Genizah in Egypt. During these travels he received possession of the Leningrad Codex, which was taken to Odessa in 1838 and later transferred to the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. Used as the sourcetext for the Biblia Hebraica in 1937 and the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia in 1977, the Leningrad Codex was digitized in the 1980s as a collaborative scholarly project organized by the Presbyterian Westminster Theological Seminary‘s J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research.

This text began as an electronic transcription by Richard Whitaker (Princeton Seminary, New Jersey) and H. van Parunak (then at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) of the 1983 printed edition of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). It was continued with the cooperation of Robert Kraft (University of Pennsylvania) and Emmanuel Tov (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), and completed by Prof. Alan Groves. The transcription was called the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster Electronic Hebrew Bible and was archived at the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) in 1987. It has been variously known as the “CCAT” or “eBHS” text. Since that time, the text has been modified in many hundreds of places to conform to the photo-facsimile of the Leningrad Codex, Firkovich B19A, residing at the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; hence the change of name. The Groves Center has continued to scrutinize and correct this electronic text as a part of its continuing work of building morphology and syntax databases of the Hebrew Bible, since correct linguistic analysis requires an accurate text.^[6]

The Groves Center decided to share the digital Westminster Leningrad Codex without restriction — a prescient and important decision made prior to the popularization of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Their altruistic decision continues to enable many innovative projects based on the text and study of the TaNaKh. The source of the Westminster Leningrad Codex that we are using for the Open Siddur Project were derived from sources shared by Christopher Kimball at tanach.us. The Internet Sacred Text Archive provides links to the full Westminster Leningrad Codex (with transliteration), here.

This text is derived from the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) of the Westminster Hebrew Institute. Thanks to Christopher V. Kimball, who graciously made the source files for this freely available. This version is based on the October 20th, 2006 WLC release.^[7]

The tragic story of the oldest but unfortunately incomplete Aleppo Codex (circa 10th Century CE) — the codex upon which the Leningrad Codex was first based and corrected against — provides a cautious lesson in contrast. Similar to the Leningrad Codex, the Aleppo Codex was also preserved by Karaite Jews. It was then stolen by Crusaders, ransomed, and later transferred to the Syrian Aleppo community where it was hidden for six centuries and zealously guarded. While the Leningrad Codex was copied and shared at the onset of the Age of Photography, the opportunity to copy and thereby preserve the Aleppo Codex was lost.

…the [Aleppo Jewish] community limited direct observation of the manuscript by outsiders, especially by scholars in modern times. Paul Kahle, when revising the text of the Biblia Hebraica in the 1920s, tried and failed to obtain a photographic copy. This forced him to use the Leningrad Codex instead for the third edition, which appeared in 1937.^[8]

In the immediate aftermath of a deadly riot against Jews and Jewish property in Aleppo in December 1947, much of the five books — the Torah section of the Aleppo Codex — disappeared.

Today, at the onset of the Digital Age, we must preserve the heritage of our culture’s creative inspiration by digitizing our collective work in open standard formats, and sharing the work so its transmission can easily be mirrored and redistributed without difficulty. The Open Siddur Project is committed to preserving the legacy of our diverse communities’ creative inspirations and calls upon all those who love the Torah and earnest spiritual practice to serve their intentions through sharing their intellectual resources.

If you represent an educational institution with copies of work in the public domain, please share digital images or digital transcriptions of this work with public domain declarations such as the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain declaration. For the preservation of our living tradition, the many surviving historic manuscripts witnessing variations of tefillot found in the Siddur, including the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scroll fragments, Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphal text, Cairo Genizah fragments, and the various girsot of the Talmud, need to be made available, freely for redistribution.

1. Open, Discoverable and Accessible;
2. Remixable;
3. Meaningful and Relevant; and
4. Community Building.

In the secular free culture world, the language is somewhat different, and the difference in emphasis can be illuminating. There, another set of four freedoms have been defined as the bedrock of the movement. In order to be a free culture work, it must give its user:

1. the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it;
2. the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it;
3. the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression; and
4. the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works.

Freedoms 1 and 2 roughly correspond to Russel’s point number 1. Freedoms 3 and 4 encompass point number 2.

What is perhaps most instructive is that the values of free culture are not defined with respect to the material itself, nor to its content. They are freedoms guaranteed to the user. Material being “open, discoverable, and accessible” is a first step. Simply putting it on the Internet and being indexed by search engines will satisfy this condition.

In the bargain of openness, content creators will have to choose to give up some exclusive rights. In exchange, the work gains a life of its own in the hands of the users, the educators and the students. In my (limited) experience of conversation with content providers, this seems to be the greatest barrier toward freeing educational works that are already made available.

Perhaps remixability is a harder sell to educators and educational content providers than openness because the advantages it provides are further from the originator. Content providers may argue that providing rights to copy material for “personal” or “educational” use satisfies their duty. However, the ability to make and distribute copies solely for limited use leads to dissemination of the material. It does not result in an active culture being developed out of it. It does not result in improvements to the original, or adaptations for differing circumstances from those the original creator envisioned. Even if those adaptations are made locally, they will ultimately be undisseminated, potentially resulting in duplication of labor, or worse, their loss to future creators and users. The absence of remixing rights builds a one-way community of consumers, instead of a multidirectional cooperative community of creators.

There is also the persistent fear of “misuse” of a work. If an author gives up exclusive control over remixes, how does he/she know that the results will still be ideologically compatible with the original? This is again a trade-off necessary for ensuring that users’ creativity can be exercised. Perceived damage to a creators’ reputation from an ideologically differing work can be mitigated by requiring that a modified work bear a notice that it was modified from its original version, and that no endorsement of the modified version by the original author is implied. Further, a web link to the original version may be included as part of the attribution. All Creative Commons free culture licenses (aside from CC0) bear these requirements. Overall, the benefits to the wider culture obtained from many creative minds working on the material outweigh the threats from “misuse.” The choice is between static read-only content and dynamic conversation among the user-creator partners.

Advocacy for creative works’ freedom represents a paradigm shift in thought among content creators: In a free culture, a premium is not placed on the material as-such or even the particular rights associated with the material. Instead, it is on the users’ freedom, and it is that freedom that is the prerequisite to large-scale creative engagement with educational material.

• How might the Jewish community increase Jewish literacy as more religious and educational resources become digitized in e-formats, and thus become more easily disseminated and accessed?
• Will prayer become more individualized as siddurs (prayer books) become available to everyone and can be carried without adding any extra bulk to a briefcase or book bag?
• Will learning of Jewish texts attract new students as Torah and Talmud become available in new formats?
• Will Jewish life become less expensive by saving on the purchase of books at religious schools and day schools?
• How might synagogues and JCCs build relationships beyond their walls as sermons, newsletters and blog entries are sent to the palm of constituents’ hands?
• Will all Jews need a handheld device, like new students at some universities, in order to fully participate in all the community has to offer?

How else might the Jewish world change as it enters the digital realm? What’s your organization or community doing to interact in the digital world?

Here at the Open Siddur Project, we see the platform we’re developing as, yes, a means for improved dissemination and access — especially for illuminating the historical diversity of Judaism’s spiritual traditions enshrined in Jewish liturgy. But this is not our raison d’etre. There are already many who are sharing texts of the siddur online. What is novel for us is the opportunity for individuals and groups to collaborate with one another: creating, remixing, and sharing art and text, each a seed-like contribution grown in the fecund mulch of our common cultural and spiritual heritage. Speaking for myself, the question of whether Jews will be davvening (praying) from e-books in the future is thus something of a distraction from what is much more interesting — how digitization of the ingredients of the siddur and collaborative publishing platforms like the Open Siddur might empower a sense of personal ownership in the craft and creation of useful and beautiful tools for engaging in spiritual relationships.

Need it be argued that print media will ever be made entirely obsolete for the Am haSefer, or People of the Book? We are, after all, a people who have enshrined in our laws the careful reproduction of our seminal texts by a capable scribe using quill and ink on animal skin parchment. I love Star Trek and hate paper goods derived from felled trees, so I’m hopeful that in the future we will at least be davvening from siddurim made from 100% recycled bamboo and hemp based sustainable paper goods. iPhone possessing Jews, serious about the fulfillment of their thrice daily t’fillah obligations, are already davvening from siddur apps. Yet, I caution against any premise that assumes digital media supplanting print media, in a sort of self-justifying march of technological progress.  Considering that conventions for sabbath observance are well fixed in the Jewish tradition, one could hardly expect print formats to disappear so long as there are Jews observing traditional sabbath laws. Saying this, I am certain that digitization will improve print resources used by Jews at any point during the week, let alone Internet or cloud-based resources — with one important caveat. We need to think seriously about how this material is licensed.

Efraim provided an insight into this issue with his economic argument for free primary data. I’d like to add to what Efraim and I began to advocate publicly on the Jewish Tech list, here in a criticism of Bar Ilan’s Responsa Project’s licensing of newly digitized historic works that are otherwise free and in the Public Domain.

The question of what formats improve access and dissemination is pressing. As cultural workers we should be interested in making access as inexpensive as possible to the source texts of Jewish culture. If we’re serious about this we will be mindful to use open standards and free culture licensing that allows others to build on top of and improve our work.

Digitization and networks provide the foundation for easy dissemination of cultural works. So much of the legacy of our cultural inheritance is already in the Public Domain, and thus, free, but bottled up in print media. The tragedy is that in the conversion from print to digital media, cultural workers are using closed standards and terms-of-use agreements which limit access to other cultural innovators. It is a real travesty when amazing and ambitious projects assume ownership of our common cultural heritage through onerous terms-of-use agreements. (See for example, Bar-Ilan’s Responsa Project or Davka Corp’s license for using public domain texts they’ve digitized).

Cultures, including our own, breathe creativity and exhale innovation. We rely on the creative works bequeathed to us by earlier generations to remain rooted in our cultural identity. Synagogue members and kids in day schools, summer camps, youth orgs, and creative Jews working on their own can all benefit from our educational, cultural, and spiritual institutions cooperating with one another in sharing the bounty of our cultural heritage. As Jews, are we not all collaborating on a grand project of Torah learning, spiritual improvement, and tikkun olam? It’s time our cultural licensing choices reflect these profound intentions.

If you’re in the Jewish content world, it’s quite possible that some day, you will develop content that is relevant not only to you and your users directly, but to the wider Jewish community.  Because the siddur is so wide ranging in scope, it may even be relevant to the Open Siddur Project in particular.  Conversely, I hope that some of the essays contributed to the Open Siddur Project would be relevant to your site(s).  By “content compatibility,” I mean the ability to post content generated for one site onto the other and then further develop it.  It is possible for content to be one-way compatible or bidirectionally compatible.

Issues of content compatibility arise out of copyright law.  All literary or creative works fixed in a tangible form (including electronic texts on the web) are covered under copyright law.  Copyright law reserves certain rights to authors or owners of works.  These rights include the rights to copy a document, to share it with others, to make changes to it, and to distribute the changed document.  For a work written by an individual in the US today, these rights are exclusive to the copyright owner until 70 years after the author’s death.  Permission must be obtained from the copyright owner in order to do any of the activities covered under copyright law with his or her work.  There are certain exceptions to copyright, including “fair use,” which allows reprinting short excerpts of works under copyright for purposes such as academic discussion.  Fair use will likely cover most of your everyday uses of copyrighted works.  There are many useful online and offline resources that go into more detail.

Content compatibility becomes a major issue when a text is developed collaboratively.  If all contributing authors do not agree to a framework for sharing their contributions, the site relies on an “implied license” from the contributors to the site owner.  The implied license covers normal operation of the site, and little else.  It most likely does not include copying from one site and placing the content in another.

Aside from relying on an implied license, some websites attempt to use “parasitic” licenses hidden in their terms of use.  These licenses attempt to claim maximum rights from the contributor, while giving a bare minimum back to the community.  Sometimes, this is intentional.  Sometimes, it’s accidental.  Some sites’ operators blindly copy fill-in-the-blanks terms of use templates that assume that the content is to be kept proprietary.  One example from a popular site that provides source sheets and other learning material is presented here:

Limited Right to Use.
The viewing, printing or downloading of any content, graphic, form or document from the Site grants you only a limited, nonexclusive license for use solely by you for your own personal use and not for republication, distribution, assignment, sublicense, sale, preparation of derivative works or other use. No part of any content, form or document may be reproduced in any form or incorporated into any information retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, other than for your personal use (but not for resale or redistribution).

Editing, Deleting and Modification.
We reserve the right in our sole discretion to edit or delete any documents, information or other content appearing on the Site.

and the rather dangerous (and dubious, emphasis added):

Use of Information.
We reserve the right, and you authorize us, to the use and assignment of all information regarding Site uses by you and all information provided by you in any manner consistent with our Privacy Policy. All remarks, suggestions, ideas, graphics, or other information communicated by you to us through the Site (collectively, the “Submission”) will forever be the property of SITE NAME. SITE NAME will not be required to treat any Submission as confidential, and will not be liable for any ideas for its business (including without limitation, product, service or advertising ideas) and will not incur any liability as a result of any similarities that may appear in future SITE NAME products, services or operations. Without limitation, SITE NAME will have exclusive ownership of all present and future existing rights to the Submission of every kind and nature everywhere. SITE NAME will be entitled to use the Submission for any commercial or other purpose whatsoever, without compensation to you or any other person sending the Submission. You acknowledge that you are responsible for whatever material you submit, and you, not SITE NAME, have full responsibility for the message, including its legality, reliability, appropriateness, originality, and copyright.

These broad claims of ownership(!) rights over submitted content work entirely to the benefit of the contract author, and against the benefit of the remainder of the community.  One also may question whether a site which serves source sheets and audio recordings of prayer texts is compromising its own potential by limiting reproduction of its materials to personal use.  A copyright-conscious contributor (such as myself) would refuse to submit to such a site, fearing that his or her own future use of his or her own material would be threatened by the (legally questionable) claim of transfer of ownership.

For an existing forum, if the operator simply removes draconian terms of use and returns the site to an implied license structure or the terms are kept in place, the following scenarios are still possible:

• Material from the project is relevant in its entirety to a free culture project (defined below) such as The Open Siddur Project.  It is not covered by fair use.  We take terms of use at their word.  We can’t use it without asking permission for all required rights from the copyright owner(s).  We either need to answer the legal question as to whether a transfer of ownership can be extracted by a terms of use agreement or track down every contributor.
• Material from another free culture project (such as The Open Siddur Project, Wikipedia, or Wikisource) is relevant in its entirety to the project.  The material cannot be copied wholesale and further developed without playing by the rules of free culture (see below).
• Fifty years from now, everyone who wrote for the project has moved on to other stages in life and other projects.  The site or project as an institution may not exist anymore, and nobody knows who are the heirs of its “intellectual property.”  Some of the material is still circulating, still relevant, and still under copyright.  Even if the original intent of the authors were never to sue anyone for use of the material, the future researcher does not know that because either no policy was written down or the written policy indicates that his or her usage rights are limited.  The material may become unpublishable and lost forever.  This problem is known as the orphan works problem .

The free culture community has developed mechanisms to make sharing and collaborative development easier.  The principles that define works of free culture are:

1. the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
2. the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
3. the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
4. the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

Note that these freedoms do not discriminate on the basis of endeavor, and all free culture works allow creation of derivative works and commercial use.

The free culture community is a group of individuals who believe that culturally-relevant works of their creation should have minimal legal impediments to their dissemination and further development.  The mechanism involves use of copyright licenses, which work by having each contributor agree to release his or her work under a given set of terms at the time of submission.  All collaborating authors may then use, share and build on the work using the rights given by the original author.  Users may share, modify, publish, and distribute the work on their own without asking for permission, as long as they comply with the liberal terms of the license.  None of the free culture licenses transfer ownership of the work.  An author may later decide to release his or her own work in another forum under a different set of terms (including “all rights reserved” copyright).

A major organization responsible for maintaining the legal framework of the free culture community is Creative Commons.  Because some authors want to retain different sets of rights over their works, Creative Commons has developed a set of copyright licenses that are widespread, well known, and well understood.  Their licenses are divided by sets of terms (note: this is just a summary of the most important features.  Read the full legal code before making a decision.):

• Creative Commons Zero – “no rights reserved” – essentially, an internationally-applicable public domain declaration, indicating that the author surrenders all rights to the work.
• Creative Commons Attribution – The work may be copied, modified, and distributed, as long as attribution is maintained and reference is made to the license.
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike – The work may be copied, modified, and distributed, as long as attribution is maintained and reference is made to the license, and all derivatives of the work are also released under the same terms.

Creative Commons also offers some licenses with *non free culture* terms (in combination with the Attribution and/or ShareAlike terms):

• NonCommercial – No commercial use.  Use of this term will also place severe limits on the work’s use in the future, both by you and your users.
• NoDerivs – The work may not be changed from its original version.  Use of this term will completely curtail communal development to the same degree as “all rights reserved” copyright.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, the largest free culture projects, have chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license for their material.

The Open Siddur Project has a somewhat more complex licensing structure, in which works that originally derive from the public domain are released with no rights reserved (Creative Commons Zero); other original works (such as translations and commentaries) may also be released under either Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 or Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, at the discretion of the author.  A combined work retains the licensing properties of the most restrictive of the set of the licensing terms of its included components.

In many cases, the Open Siddur Project’s use of Creative Commons licenses makes one-way compatibility from the Open Siddur Project to most other projects a given.  In most cases, attribution must be maintained; if the essay of interest has a ShareAlike licensing term, the derivative essay would also have to be released under the same terms.

In the other direction, the Open Siddur Project cannot currently copy and distribute works derived from sites with no explicit policy (or an explicit proprietary policy) because of their “all rights reserved” copyrights.

Because securing rights requires the consent of all contributing authors, it is best to approach these issues at the start of a project before accepting contributions from large numbers of authors.

Joining the free culture community involves surrendering some control over submitted works.  In exchange, the entire community benefits from more widespread dissemination of knowledge.  In addition to simple propagation of ideas, free culture also allows works to develop in novel ways that the authors could not have imagined.  I hope that you will consider joining the Free Culture community in building enduring, truly collaborative resources for the Jewish community.

We hope to begin a conversation about content compatibility with the world of online Jewish content providers. If you’re interested in joining it, talk to us.