Free

The English adjective free is commonly used in one of two meanings: “for ” (gratis) and “with little or no restriction” (libre). This ambiguity of  can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright and patents.

Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the freedoms mentioned above. Because the Berne Convention in most countries by default grants copyright holders monopolistic control over their creations, copyright content must be explicitly declared, usually by the referencing or inclusion of licensing statements from within the work.

Although there are a great many different definitions in regular everyday use, free content is legally very similar, if not like an identical twin, to open content. An analogy is a use of the rival terms software and open source, which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones.^[3][4][5] For instance, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition describes “open” as synonymous to the definition of in the “Definition of Free Cultural Works” (as also in the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition).^[6] For such open content both movements recommend the same three Creative Commons licenses, the CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0.^{[7][8][9][10]}