Open content can be modified by more or less anyone, such as pages at openpolitics.ca itself.

Any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video may be open content.

All such content is published in a format that makes it technically easy to copy the content/information.

legal status

Content can be either in the public domain? or under a share-alike license like the CC-by-sa, CC-by-nc-sa or GNU Free Documentation License?.

Its Terms of Use guarantee open access to all contributions on CC-by to even other federal political party rivals. However, pages that are modified by multiple parties or include GPC-contracted content are distributed to the public only under CC-by-nc-sa. This forbids commercial use, but allows NGO? or government use or even use in lobby efforts by non-commercial parties.

legal definitions

The open content movement has no one set of definitions. It is certainly not defined by a common legal principle nor even a set of boilerplate? license? clauses. So far it has been only applied to copyright?able works and some (notably Creative Commons) favour the term flexible copyright. See consortium? for trademark and patent commons? for patent concerns.

who's doing it

An extremely wide variety of projects and industries exploit open content.

projects

Notable such efforts setting precedent?s for any eventual generic definition of open content are:

• Project Gutenburg? - gathering texts in public domain?
• GFDL corpus - especially Wikipedia and Wikinfo
• Common Content - including Share Alike efforts
• MIT Open Courseware?

leaders

Creative Commons, "a nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative work" offers a parametric license? suite and excellent practical advice on how to choose one for your work. The lp:design recommends making use of this license suite wherever possible - if you can release your work under CC-by you may simply upload image?s or upload files of other kinds directly into this wiki.

CC also takes the lead in defining future open content licenses, or at least facilitating discussions on them. The speculative content on its wiki is often quite visionary, and speculations about future license possibilities has included:

• a science license to require adherence to scientific method?
• a peace license? to restrict military use
• a green license? to forbid use that implies or entails extinction
• a guild license? to advance sustainable trades
• a generic web terms of use? license to make web based service?s easier to build without legal problems
• a parametric mutual non-disclosure? agreement to simplify commerical dealings over the net
• etc.

politics of open content

What all open content efforts have in common is a distate for monopolies on information and a desire to facilitate continuous improvement? and wide sharing of a base of creative work?s or instructional capital.

Different efforts have varying concern for creators being compensated. All seem to make attribution high priority, since few people trust information that is totally unattributed.

policies by country and party

As of 2005, the Green Party of Canada was deliberating the role of such licenses for non-creative works - instructional capital - in Canada's industrial strategy?. See Science and Technology for an outline of platform proposals relevant to this.''

defines open party

An open party is partly defined by its use of open content in its deliberative democracy and decision making functions. The Green Party of Canada was moving strongly in this direction with Living Platform and Living Agenda until the GPC Council Crisis. It remains to be seen if open content will continue to play a role in that or any other Canadian federal political party, but it seems likely, as the Living Platform in Practice ran into no problems related to open content itself.

required for open politics

Open politics itself can be said to rely absolutely on open content, since it seems quite difficult or impossible to do open politics argument without sharing the knowledge base.