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Share-alike
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Creative Commons licenses. (Discuss) |
Share-alike is a descriptive term used in the Creative Commons project for copyright licenses which include certain copyleft provisions.
You are allowed to copy, recast, transform, adapt, perform, record or translate a share-alike copyrighted work, however doing so creates a "derived work" on which share-alike copyright restrictions are automatically imposed. This is the "share and share alike" aspect of copyleft, even if those copyright restrictions are not explicitly stated.
- The GNU Project's General Public License (GPL) and Free Documentation License (GFDL) are similar to share-alike licenses.
- The Creative Commons suite of licenses includes a wider range of share-alike licenses which are denoted usually as "-sa" licenses, e.g.
- CC-by-sa, which requires attribution and is similar but incompatible to the GFDL
- CC-nc-sa, which requires non-commercial use only is share-alike but is not free content
The specific definition used by Creative Commons is that "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one." However, generic variations of share-alike licenses define free software and open content. The term copyleft has been used since the 80s to describe these terms by the free software community.
By contrast, there are also many permissive free software licences which do not require share-alike terms to be applied, thus permitting users to make modifications and improvements and apply a modified and more restrictive license.