Glossary

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Attribution

Attribution means simply that the author of a piece of work of whatever kind is credited with their part in the work in an accompanying text, strapline, colophon in the case or an image or sound recording or in the case of a text, in an appropriate place according to the conventions of the specific media.

Author

The author of a work is the person, company or other entity which is deemed to have produced it. The author of a book is the person who wrote it. The author of a website might be one or several people.

Cease and desist letter

A letter from a lawyer requested or insisting that what they understand to be a copyright infringement stop.

Commons

The commons are resources or goods held in common, that are owned by all and could not or should not be turned into property or diminished. Air is a good example of a commons.

Copyleft

Copyleft is phrase first used by artist Ray Johnson to describe the way he mixed images together from various media sources and then made them available by ephemeral means such as mail art or as gifts. The phrase has since been used by Free Software developers to name their variant use of copyright law.

Copyright

A set of laws, originally designed to protect publishing monopolies, which give those who purchase or otherwise obtain a license from authors to have rights over their work's publication.

Creator

(see Author)

Derivative Work

A derivative work is something that uses as an element in its composition a part or even the whole of another work. Sample-based music is often derivative for instance. The theory of derivation requires that there be a fixed and unmoving point of origination. A theory of culture which sees it as a matter of flows, change and emergent collaboration would claim that all work is derivative.

FLOSS

"Free/Libre and Open Source Software"

Fair Use

Fair use rights are those which allow you, if you are for instance writing an academic paper or a review of a book or website to quote that material.

GNU GPL

The GNU GPL (online at http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl/html) is a license for software which guarantees continuing rights to these freedoms:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). Freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

This definition of freedom is taken from the Free Software Foundation website: http://www.fsf.org/

Gratis

Without any financial cost.

Infringement

In the case of copyright, an infringement is usually using copyrighted material without receiving permission from the author or owner of the copyright.

Liability

To have a responsibility for or to be subject to the consequences of something.

License

A document which sets the terms of use of a piece of software or other item of culture. A user is licensed to use the material in certain ways. This booklet lists licenses which set out to maximize the usefulness of such material.

Open Content

Here this is used as a generic term. Content is any material, data, files, images, texts, which are not part of software or other digital systems but which are handled by them. "Open" content is any such content which is made available by means of one of the kinds of licenses described in this booklet. One of the licenses described here, "Open Content" (see page 86) which has now been subsumed by the Creative Commons project also used this term.

Peer to peer (P2P)

A system by which files can be shared over a network, often the internet. Usually peer to peer systems are arranged in a distributed network which makes users simultaneously a hub and a node. P2P systems to look for are, amongst others, BitTorrent, Gnutella and Kazaa.

Preamble

The opening statements to a license that do not usually form part of its legally applicable terms. The preamble is important to understand legal documents also as a form of narrative in which certain ideas and norms are invented and circulated.

Proprietary

Something that is owned by a company and which is so formatted that it does not allow access to its source code.

Public Domain

Something in the public domain is available for anyone to use regardless of copyright.

(Non)Revocable

A license is revocable if you can change its terms after something has been made public. Usually licenses are non-revocable.

Royalties

A proportion of the profit assigned to an author after publishers, distributors and other have taken their (usually larger) percentages.

Source Code

Source code is what a programmer works on in a programming language before it is compiled (turned into machine code). For FLOSS it is essential therefore that the source code be accessible to allow others to work on and improve it.

Verbatim Copy

A full and complete copy without any changes.

Warranty

A warranty is usually a guarantee that things are of a certain quality, that they will not fail to work under normal circumstances of use. Software for instance is usually issued without a warranty.

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