Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org

Founded in 2001, Creative Commons has developed a Web application that licenses creative works  on the Internet: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc.

"Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions." http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

"We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved." http://creativecommons.org/about/history

For a good overview, see the article "Creative Commons : Soyons créatifs ensemble"http://www.framasoft.net/article2185.html

GNU GPL  http://www.gnu.org/home.html

All about the GNU Project, launched in 1984 in order to develop a complete free software UNIX style operating system. GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”; it is pronounced “guh-noo.”

This is also the web site of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Open Source Software Movement

" The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing." http://www.opensource.org/

For the definition of Open Source Software see: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

"Open-source software is required to have its source code freely available; end-users have the right to modify and redistribute the software, as well as the right to package and sell the software." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Overview

Copy Left

Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well"

To copyleft a program, it must first be copyrighted; then distribution terms are added, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.

Proprietary software developers use copyright to take away the users' freedom; Copyleft use copyright to guarantee user's freedom. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html

To learn more about Copy Left see: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CopyLeft

Free Art Licence www.artlibre.org
"It is not the goal of the Free Art License to eliminate copyright or author's rights. Quite the opposite, it is about reformulating the relevance of these rights while taking today's environment into account. It is about the right to freedom of movement, to free copying and to free transformation of works of art. The right to work in freedom for art and artists."www.artlibre.org/licence.php/lalgb.html