Licensing Common
Licensing is the process that copyright owners use to monitor reproduction, distribution, or other use of creative works. Majority of the license outside the commons are specific, costly, and restrictive. Licensing in the commons is quite different. Creators have begun to use the licensing model to grant permissions for many uses in advance. The GNU General Public License (GPL), developed by Richard Stallman at MIT in the 1980s is an example of such license. “The GNU Free Documentation License is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or non-commercially.” The GPL allow works in the common to be secured in the common.
Read more about this topic: Information Commons
Famous quotes containing the word common:
“The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)