So, you’ve found The FREE Licence Project, dear visitor. Very good, we bid you welcome!
Here we’ve compiled a document that will give answers to all your questions — hopefully —, about what The FREE Licence Project is, what licences are available and how to make use of them to your advantage. It aims to educate creators about licensing in general and helps to make an informed decision whether a FREE Licence can be suitable for your affairs.
Well now, let’s have a look at it, shall we?
- TL;DR
- Basics
1.1 What is a licence?
1.2 Why do I need a licence?
1.3 How do I apply a licence?
1.4 How do I choose the right licence?- What is The FREE Licence Project?
- What is the novelty with The FREE Licence Project ?
3.1 Software licences everywhere
3.2 Focussing on works of art
3.3 No attribution by default
3.4 Not simply public domain
3.5 Non-aggression principle- Our licences
4.1 FREE-NA
4.2 FREE-NA-ND
4.3 How to apply a FREE Licence
4.4 Use a graphical “badge” to signal the licence
4.5 How to handle the LICENCE-APPENDIX template
4.6 Naming scheme- Conclusion
You can release your work under the FREE-NA Licence simply by placing the following lines close-by your work:
Licence: FREE-NA
github.com/thefreelicence/free-na
With that, you, as the creator, made your work freely available to everyone by (a) granting comprehensive rights of use, (b) including the right to produce derivative work, (c) made sure derivative work also stays free and (d) prohibited the use in aggressive acts by applying the non-aggression principle.
Congratulation, you just created free cultural work!
Unfold text here, to acquire your basic knowledge about licences and licensing
Generally speaking, a licence is a written permit issued by the owner of “a thing”, which certifies the right of someone else to be allowed to use or access this certain “thing”. But this only leads us to the next question …
We all see ourselves confronted with living in so-called “jurisdictions”. These entities come into our world by some sort of constitutive ritual and then continue to exist by the belief of a certain mass of people that this jurisdiction has the power to rule over the affairs of their lives, their lives itself and the lives of others. So far, there’s practically no big chance of breaking free from this.
This does mean also, the jurisdiction rules over the things you have created yourself. This is done by so-called “copyright laws” or whatever the local peculiarity of this concept is named. By default, many copyright laws administer that you, as the creator, hold all the rights to your creation and no-one can do anything with it at all.
But you, as the creator, may have the desire to offer access to your work to others. It is then very often required of you to explicitly grant so-called “rights of use” to other people, that allow them to use your work for a certain purpose. Issuing such single permits can be laborious and time-consuming. Here is where licences come into play, to make such a process quick and easy and transparent for all participants.
During the release process you can associate your work with a licence. You can do so by adding a simple text file, the licence text itself or just a reference to the licence text close-by your work. With that you have granted all the rights to other people you wanted them to have in one single easy action. However, this presupposes that you decided beforehand what rights about your work you want to grant to other people – meaning the general public in most cases. So a licence needs to be chosen carefully.
Choosing the right licence means choosing the right licence for your goals you pursue with your work. For instance, you may have strict commercial goals and only want to allow a defined narrow corridor of use cases you grant. On the other hand, it may be your wish to enable as many people as possible to enjoy and use your work in ways you never even imagined yourself. So there is a spectrum you need to be aware of and contemplate thoroughly.
There are already many licences existing; some differ a lot from each other, some are pretty similar; they all try to cater for different needs. To get a glimpse on the current licence landscape, here is a selection of links that are worth of skimming through, should you be interested:
Note that almost all licences cater for source code of software — Creative Commons being the big exception.
The FREE Licence Project started out of necessity. Although there are many different licensing schemes available today, still they all left us repining. They did not meet our needs to full extent. So, we had to create new ones ourselves, had to be able to present them to the world and at the same time make them available for others to use. Residing on GitHub since 2023, The FREE Licence Project acts as the vehicle for this purpose.
Since then, The FREE Licence Project aims to become the new go-to standard in licensing for artists and creators of free cultural work.
In contrast to many other licence documents, we aspire to keep our licence texts very concise and intelligible, so that no-one needs to be afraid of reading such an important document.
… in other words: why would we need to create a new brand of licences at all? The problems we found with the current licensing landscape are manifold:
We found the majority of licences to be dealing with software licensing. This emerged from the free software movement in the 1980s and led to the free and open-source software principle (FOSS) which is very wide-spread and well-known today. Although we deem this a very good achievement and we feeling a very strong connection to this type of philosophical foundation, these software licences can not simply be applied to other creative works, such as works of music, text, visual art or cultural works in general. The content of these licence texts applies to software and makes no sense when applied to other forms of work.
Our goal was to make a licence available that is applicable to works of art or cultural works in the broadest sense. Of course, we are aware of Creative Commons (CC) and the Free Art License (FAL/LAL) — but while one failed to offer the fine-grained tuning of permissions/restrictions we had hoped for, the other seemed too complicated to use at all. This is why we felt the need to create our FREE Licences.
Although being primarily focussed on works of art, this does not prevent The FREE Licence Project to create a licence specifically for software or other realms, should there be a need at some future date. In fact, in our understanding, a FREE Licence can also perfectly be applied to software right now.
Another downside of available licences applicable to works of art is the requirement to attribute the creator in all circumstances. This can be unaesthetic, cumbersome or even impossible in some cases. That is why with a FREE Licence there is no attribution required.
We understand the desire of artists to be credited for their work — and rightly so. That is why we encourage the user to give credit to an artist whose work he is using. For that reason we created the LICENCE-APPENDIX accompanying our licences; a text file where the original creator can leave notes for a user concerning donations and a way to give credit. We do strongly recommend to attribute the creator — but it is just not strictly required by default.
In our understanding, only when this strict requirement for attribution is loosened, a work can be considered as a free work of art or free cultural work.
With all this restriction loosening, then why not simply put the work into the public domain (PD, CC0, WTFPL)? This may be an appropriate way for some artists, yes. However, there are important things to consider:
(1) The case could occur, in which some jurisdictions might not recognise the act of “putting a work into the public domain” as issuing a licence. Therefore you may end up with having officially not issued a licence at all and not having granted any rights of use. This may be problematic for future users and this can not be your wish as a creator who wanted to make the work available to others.
(2) Putting works into the public domain does not ensure that derivative works also stay in the public domain. Derivative works, when released, can be licenced with a new and different licence or remain proprietary in the worst case. When choosing to use a FREE Licence that allows for derivative work, you, as the creator, are actively deciding for perpetuating the freedom of the cultural work you once created throughout space and time. This is what “free” really means: to ensure that also derivative works stay free forever.
(3) Also when releasing into the public domain, you must be aware that really anyone can do anything with your work — this does include the utilisation for military purposes, warfare, coercion, theft and many other detrimental activities. This may not be your wish as the creator of art or cultural work. That is why we incorporated the non-aggression principle as a fundamental property of all our FREE Licences.
The non-aggression principle is the keystone of our licences. This means, work licensed with a FREE Licence can be used, but it rules out the utilisation for or during aggressive acts. The phrasing used in our licence texts is:
The work shall not be used with intention to carry out aggression.
While “aggression” is defined as:
… any act that is (i) harmful to body or mind of a living being or (ii) violates, erodes or undermines the freedom or self-determination of a living being or (iii) damages, destroys or purloins property or possession of a living being — exempt a defence against such an act of aggression.
This might sound like a very strong but at the same time pretty weak restriction. However, this way a user is “forced” to second guess and contemplate his motivation before using the work for his intended purpose. It may be true, that in most cases no-one may be able to verify whether this condition is met for a certain use case — but we are convinced that the explicit exclusion of aggression in the rights of use granted by a FREE Licence, appeals to anyone’s own conscience and does its part there.
Like a free software must remain free and a free cultural work must remain free, it was our intention that a creative work must fulfil the requirement to be used with good intent and evade evil. We are actively challenging for a moral judgment to be made: for one thing by the creator of a work when in the process of deciding whether to use a FREE Licence or not – on the other hand by the user of a work later on.
This is by far what a FREE Licence sets itself apart from other licences.
In this section we present the licences made available by The FREE Licence Project. So far we speak of two licences suitable best for cultural works.
Our first and most important licence.
Full name: The FREE Non-Aggression Licence
Shorthand: FREE-NA
By applying it to your work, you are able to grant comprehensive rights of use, including the right to produce derivative work. Having the non-aggression principle incorporated, it acts as a restriction to bar from usage for aggressive acts.
Please see the licence’s dedicated repository for the full licence text: github.com/thefreelicence/free-na
In our understanding, work being licensed with the FREE-NA Licence qualifies for being considered as “free cultural work” as laid out by Creative Commons and freedomdefined.org. The sole restriction to not use a work for aggressive acts can not disqualify FREE-NA as a free cultural work licence — if so, it would render the whole definition of “free” rather absurd. In fact, excluding the use for aggressive acts would make a licence even more free in the grand scheme of things than those licences implicitly permitting it.
The small brother of FREE-NA, but not less important at all.
Full name: The FREE Non-Aggression No Derivatives Licence
Shorthand: FREE-NA-ND
By applying it to your work, you are able to grant comprehensive rights of use, but exclude the right to produce derivatives. This means, a user can not modify your work and publish it afterwards. However, having also the non-aggression principle incorporated, it acts as a restriction to bar from usage for aggressive acts.
Please see the licence’s dedicated repository for the full licence text: github.com/thefreelicence/free-na-nd
This licence does not qualify as a licence for free cultural works, because of the restriction imposed, to not be able to create derivative works.
As an aside: our licence texts themselves are licenced under this FREE-NA-ND licence. Ironically, it is important that the licence texts remain verbatim the same everywhere and therefore have the chance to become well-established, recognisable and a reliable way of licensing works.
Applying a licence to your work is mind-boggling easy and you even can choose from several options that suits your kind of work best. As already described in the Basics section above, you can:
(A) Simply type the following lines close-by your work:
Licence: FREE-NA
github.com/thefreelicence/free-na
… or a more verbose form of that, should you choose so. This example is done with FREE-NA as the licence, so should you prefer FREE-NA-ND, you can use this accordingly.
(B) Add the LICENCE file from the licence’s repository to your work, if the kind and the form of your work allows for it.
(C) Use the text from within the LICENCE file and add it close-by your work.
In addition to the lines of text to notify about your chosen licence, you can use a small (or big) image to signal visually the licence you chose to release your work under. It can look like this:
You can find the prepared images in the media repository here:
github.com/thefreelicence/media
Of course you can also come up with your own ideas to signal the licence and make your own unique graphics. But whatever you do: make cool stuff!
You may have noticed that in every licence repository there is an adjacent LICENCE-APPENDIX file. Use this to add what we call the “creator’s notes”. Edit the file according to your needs and add it to your work using method (B) or (C) described for the LICENCE file in the section above.
However, we recommend appending the content of the LICENCE-APPENDIX file to the LICENCE file itself. We simply keep them separate in the repositories, to make clear what is the official licence text and what is “just” the appendix.
You don’t have to use this file or its content — it is just a recommendation to provide additional information to the user who is interested in your work and plans to use it.
The naming conventions of our licences are well-arranged and easy to understand. Using “FREE-NA-ND” as an example to break it down:
FREE signals affiliation with The FREE Licence Project
-NA as an epithet signals the non-aggression principle
-ND as an epithet signals the no derivatives restriction
There is room for more epithets (and maybe even exceptions) should practical experience call for it in the future and as The FREE Licence Project progresses.
We hope our essay about licences in general and the FREE Licences we make available in particular has been insightful for you. As of now, you should have attained understanding of what licensing means, why it may be necessary and what the goals and the advantages of using a FREE Licence are.
If you were on the journey of looking out for a licence to apply to your work you’re planning to release, you should be now able to make a confident decision whether a FREE Licence or after all any other licence suits your needs best.
If your desire is to release free cultural work, we would of course be more than delighted should you decide for using our FREE-NA Licence.
Onward,
your FREE Licence team