How to license openDemocracy Material
How to license openDemocracy Material
Tony Curzon Price
Thursday April 26th 2008
Contents
- Why is most of oD's material licensed under Creative Commons?
- I'd like to license or re-use something on the site. How can I do this?
Why is most of oD's material licensed under Creative Commons?
openDemocracy is a strong supporter of the ethos of Creative Commons. Our authors write for us because they believe that it is important to have their message heard. Our readers donate to us because they believe in a vision that commentary and analysis is a global public good, something to be made available for free, for as many as possible--as part of the global commons.
We try to almost always publish under the UK version of the Non-derivative, Non-Commercial, Attribution license. If you would like to check what that means that you can do with our material, please follow this procedure.
We strongly believe in the importance of authorial voice and responsibility, so we choose to use the ``No Derivatives, Attribution'' license as a default. ``No derivatives'', because we would like the author's voice to be heard as intended. ``Attribution'' because we believe that arouns an author's identity accrues reputation, belief-worhtiness, and even--the word seems right in this cntext--authority.
We restrict the Creative Commons licensing to uses of our material which do not contribute to someone else's income-generation. We do this because we are trying to increase the total funds that go into producing material of the type that we produce for the global, free commons. Hence, if our material is contributing to your organisation's income generation capacity, we expect to find some licensing agreement which brings net resources to openDemocracy's effort. Therefore, our default is to license under the ``Non-Commercial'' version of the Creative Commons license.
Sometimes we cannot license under Creative Commons at all, and sometimes some of our authors choose to license under less restrictive terms. So please check the bottom of the page that you would like to license to check that it is indeed licensed under these terms.
I'd like to license or re-use something on the site. How can I do this?
It depends who you are and what you are licensing the material for. The quick answer is:
- If the content you are wanting to use is not making money for you, and
- You are a non-commercial entity, and
- The page you find the content on has a block at the bottom stating that openDemocracy and the author have released the content under a Creative Commons license, then
- You can copy the widget code at the top left of the page you want to license into your own web page.
If any of these conditions don't apply, or if you want to use the material in some other form from that which appears in the widget, you should get in touch with us.
