Creative Commons is a nonprofit
that offers a flexible copyright for creative work. Creative Commons
defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright - all
rights reserved - and the public domain - no rights reserved. Their
licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of
your work - a “some rights reserved” copyright. Extensive
information about their licenses and their legal concepts can be found
here. Soon they will
launch their Science
Commons project which they describe as :
The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.
Meanwhile, NeverEndingBooks.org has taken a Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Belgium license. Here is what it means
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
That is, if you use any results contained in the texts offered by
TheLibrary you must give a reference containing the following
information
Author of the text, Title of the work, TheLibrary (2005) NeverEndingBooks.org
as you would do (I hope) with any other source you use in your work.
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial
purposes. That is, you are not allowed to copy a text from TheLibrary
and distribute it for money nor may you use any part of this site
(including logos and names) for your own profit. Still, these
restrictions may be waived by the copyright holder(s). This means, in
the case of courses and books from TheLibrary, the author of the text.
For all other matters email
copyright@neverendingbooks.org.
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform,
or build upon this work. This means that you are not allowed to copy
texts from TheLibrary, make some modifications or additions to them and
pass them off as your own work. Clearly, you are still allowed to make
‚Äòfair use’ of the material. That is, you can build upon results
contained in the texts assuming you give proper reference (see
above).
Finally, the Belgium-part of the license means that the legal code of the license (which is available in Dutch and in French) works under Belgian law, see here for more details.
As stated, this is the default (fairly restrictive) cc-license for NeverEndingBooks. In the future it may be that certain authors allow access to their texts under other licenses. This will then be specified by the appropriate icons (see here for other possible licenses, among which certainly the Developing Nations license deserves to be promoted). The licenses are also readable to robots visisting this site and in the near future we will also include the xmp-metadata into all available pdf-files.
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Written on Mon, 10 January 2005 at 2:41 pm
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