Notice of License

The material provided on this page is not legal advice. It is an explanation of the intent of the design of the license, with regard to its use and applicability. The specific legal requirements of notice of license may vary in some jurisdictions. If you have questions related to the legal implications of the use of this license, you should consult a lawyer for specifics, and remember that the courts generally serve as the final arbiter of such matters.

Copyright Holder:

If you hold the copyright for something and wish to license it under the terms of the OWL, you may in essence do so just about any way you like. See a lawyer for more specifics, but acceptable means of offering a work under the terms of the OWL (or most/any other licenses, with appropriate substitutions of terms) include:

  1. For online display of licensed content, post notice of acceptable license terms, such as with text (including link) similar in form to "This content Copyright 2008, and may be redistributed under the terms of the OWL."
  2. Offer compressed archive for download, with license text in an included file.
  3. Offer content download with included URL for the online OWL page and text similar to that in option 1 of this list.
  4. Provide physical printed media with the text of the license included.
  5. Provide physical printed media with included URL of the online OWL page and text similar to that in option 1 of this list.
  6. Provide physical storage media such as a CD with the text of the license in an included file.
  7. Provide physical storage media such as a CD with included URL of the online OWL page and text similar to that in option 1 of this list.
  8. Provide the full text of the license with the content.
  9. . . . et cetera.

You may add an image to your license notice text, such as an 80x15 widget image that links to the license text:

This should not stand in for a proper, textual notice of license terms, however, because its meaning as notice of license may be ambiguous to some readers.

Redistributor:

It is probably a bad idea to redistribute content covered by the terms of any license without distributing the full text of the license with the content, if you are not the copyright holder of that content, for legal reasons.

Recipient:

If you believe you have received content subject to the terms of the OWL without being advised of the applicability of the OWL's terms, please contact the redistributor to resolve the issue. If the redistributor fails to abide by the terms of the OWL, please contact the copyright holder if possible and inform him or her of this oversight. Such license enforcement issues are not the responsibility of the maintainer of the OWL itself.

Dual-Licensing:

Because of its weak heritability and license restriction characteristics, there should be no legal need to dual-license a work covered by the OWL to encourage adoption, use, or redistribution. It may serve as an ideal companion to licenses with strong heritability such as the CCD CopyWrite License, however -- particularly in cases where the software-specific BSD and MIT/X11 licenses are not appropriate. There may be social reasons to dual-license a work covered by the OWL, however, to associate a given work with an established license with significant mindshare. The BSD and MIT/X11 licenses are ideal for these purposes with regard to software, and the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license serves similarly well for other content types.