Free license in the context of Open educational resources

The Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN), or National Geographic Institute is a Spanish government agency, dependent on the Spanish Ministry of Public Works. Founded in 1870, it is the national mapping agency for Spain, together with the Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica (CNIG).

Since 2015, most of its products (including MTN50 and MTN25 topographic maps, and PNOA aerial photographies) are freely available online, and licensed under a CC-BY-4.0-like license, as FOM/2807/2015 decree requires its products must be released under a free license.

A national mapping agency (NMA) is an organisation, usually publicly owned, that produces topographic maps and geographic information of a country. Some national mapping agencies also deal with cadastral matters.

According to 2007/2/EC European directive, national mapping agencies of European Union countries must have publicly available services for searching, viewing and downloading their spatial data. Maps produced by some of them are available under a free license that allows re-use, such as a Creative Commons license.

A public license or public copyright license is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees.By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.

Some public licenses, such as the GNU GPL and the CC BY-SA, are also considered free or open copyright licenses. However, other public licenses like the CC BY-NC are not open licenses, because they contain restrictions on commercial or other types of use.

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.

In most countries, the Berne Convention grants copyright holders control over their creations by default. Therefore, copyrighted content must be explicitly declared free by the authors, which is usually accomplished by referencing or including licensing statements from within the work. The right to reuse such a work is granted by the authors in a license known as a free license, a free distribution license, or an open license, depending on the rights assigned. These freedoms given to users in the reuse of works (that is, the right to freely use, study, modify or distribute these works, possibly also for commercial purposes) are often associated with obligations (to cite the original author, to maintain the original license of the reused content) or restrictions (excluding commercial use, banning certain media) chosen by the author. There are a number of standardized licenses offering varied options that allow authors to choose the type of reuse of their work that they wish to authorize or forbid.

Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software. This article primarily focuses on topics particular to software.

Software copyright is used by software developers and proprietary software companies to prevent the unauthorized copying of their software. Free and open source licenses also rely on copyright law to enforce their terms. For instance, copyleft licenses impose a duty on licensees to share their modifications to the work with the user or copy owner under some circumstances. No such duty would apply had the software in question been in the public domain.