Free content
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose."[1] Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
For the use of free content on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Free content.In most countries, the Berne Convention grants copyright holders monopolistic control over their creations by default, therefore, copyrighted content must be explicitly declared free. This is usually accomplished by referencing or including licensing statements from within the work.
A free cultural work is, according to the definition of Free Cultural Works, one that has no significant legal restriction on people's freedom to:
Although there are a great many different definitions in regular everyday use, free content is legally very similar to open content. An analogy is a use of the rival terms free software and open-source, which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones.[3] The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement.[4][5] For instance, the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition describes "open" as synonymous with the definition of free in the "Definition of Free Cultural Works" (as also in the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition).[6] For such free/open content both movements recommend the same three Creative Commons licenses, the CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0.[7][8][9][10]
