Wikevent:Copyleft

From Wikevent

What is a copyleft?

Basically, a copyleft is copyright, but to the left. It means that a work is copyrighted, but with liberalized terms that permits others to use, modify, or redistribute a work under the required terms of a copyright license. The usually amounts to simply requiring the user, modifier, or distributor to attribute the author(s) and possibly any modifications, the distributed product under a similar copyright license.

Things contributors should understand

By adding to, subtracting from, deleting, uploading, or altering anything on Wikevent you are expressly licensing the final product (work, product, contribution) under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 (CC-by 2.5) license.

This basically boils down to you permit anyone, including but not limited to every jerk, nutjob, psychopath, prick, scammer, whore, or the guy on the corner of the street yelling about being decapitated the right to alter, added to, or subtract from your contribution and copyright the end product under any copyright they so choose so long as the jerk attributes you and other contributors as the others of the original work. This means any large international corporation can use your work and redistribute it in any manner they want permitted under the license, which includes putting your work in a commercial or printing it in a magazine. Yes, this means someone else get rich using your hard work.

Why then would you work on Wikevent? Well, because Wikevent is an open source, which means by contribution you are helping to make information free to the billions of people globally that may potentially use it for good. Also, if you're with a venue, a band, or other presenter by uploading your information you're actually giving yourself free PR! Plus, you are earning your right in being TIME Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006 [1].

We intend for Wikevent to be the source for events on the web. Does that mean that we want everybody to have to come to Wikevent to find out what's happening. No. Does that mean that we want people to have to pay a fee to use our event listings on their own sites? Definetely not! We want to be the source for event listings so that there is one, simple as that. We are not interested in competing with consumers of event listings, like say Eventful or Upcoming. Nope, we just want those services to be better, simple as that.