This site is the home of the definition of COOPY the Cooperative License and its manifestations.
COOPY is short for cooperative licensing of copying in which we agree to cooperate on copying. At present there are two variants, cooperative licensing of copying rights with no changes, shortened to COOPYright, and cooperative licensing of copying including derivations with sharing of any resulting revenues, shortened to COOPYshare. So Cooperative License of copying = COOPY + right or share.
The two variants coopyright and coopyshare are normaly written as COOPYright and COOPYshare for a more distinctive presentation such as in notices on content works.
COOPYright licensors cooperate with licensees by letting them copy
and distribute their work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), provided the
licensees cooperate with licensors by not modifying the work or
removing the COOPYright notice or any commercial content of the
licensor such as advertising.
COOPYshare licensors cooperate with licensees by letting them copy, distribute and create derived works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes) provided the licensees also license their derived works as COOPYshare and share any revenue arising fairly with their licensors.
Commercial COOPYright works earn their revenue themselves such as
by containing advertising, product referrals or voluntary appeals, and these may not be removed or altered by licensees. Commercial COOPYshare works gain their revenue in similar ways but
licensees may remove or replace licensors advertising
provided they share their own revenue fairly according to Cooperative Principles.
Neither COOPYright nor COOPYshare levy any charge for the acts of
copying (or compilation in the copyright sense) and distribution, and in
the case of COOPYshare, creating a derived work, either for personal
use or public use. Neither need to distinguish between commercial and
non-commercial use, though as a convenience and to benefit from its
familiarity, our present implementation CC+COOPY adopts the appropriate Creative Commons licenses for
non-commercial use and adds Cooperative Licences for commercial use.
The contents of a work may be partly COOPYright and partly COOPYshare which means some portions of content are licensed as COOPYright so the licensee may not change it and some as COOPYshare which allows derivations. The CC+COOPY licenses assign defaults which may be over-ridden by explicit COOPYright or COOPYshare notices.
FAQ
A. We are not competing with open source, rather offering a cooperative addition to the part they don't cover. At present we are building COOPY on the Creative Commons open licences for non-commercial use, and adding commercial use at CC+COOPY. We would be interested in adding to the GPL in a similar way.
Q. Why cooperative?
Many
have pioneered and practise cooperative endeavor in the material
fields, but limited in the IP fields so far. We believe that the cooperative is
the right paradigm with the right principles and so to encourage
their formation and existence we plan to license Family Systems patents to any cooperative formed
and operated to the cooperative principles and which uses an Ibook System product or service. Our starting point is the www.coopy.biz free registration and archive service for information cooperatives.
Q. How do we apply the Education principle of Cooperatives?
A. We take our particular role in the educational objective of the Cooperative
movement as being to empower all with all the
benefits of the Internet and software and peer to peer realms in our
Information universe.
Coop links
ICA Statement on the Co-operative Identity