tagged: licensing • the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ

Access, Sharing, and Innovation through Digitization and the Public Domain

Contributor(s):

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. . . .

Copyright and Commercial Use: the Problem with Creative Commons’ Non-Commercial Use Licenses

Contributor(s):

Efraim Feinstein

This post continues the series of advocacy posts directed at Jewish content creators and aggregators. Other parts of the series discussed the global communal benefit of free primary data resources and issues of copyright license compatibility and the connection between copyright licensing and remixability. While my previous post briefly mentioned the non-free Creative Commons licenses, this post details why you should choose a free culture license. In particular, it urges you to avoid the licenses with the non-commercial-use only (NC) terms. . . .

Jewish Content, Free Culture and “Content Compatibility” by Efraim Feinstein

Contributor(s):

Efraim Feinstein

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

the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
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. . . .