C.A.R.E.

Concepts Appropriated, Reuse Everywhere

or, Copyleft Arduous, Requirements Eschewed

For a long time I had been looking for a solution to the fan art liberation conundrum: you made something you want to liberate. It contains things you don't have any "right" to. What do you do?

It seems really tempting to release it under something like the CC-BY-NC-SA, because that way the original creator should be happy you're not letting anyone else make money off it, right?

Wrong. Intellectual property "rights" are actually an onion of sorts.

Onion referenced from this image, informally released by its owner to the public domain

As you can see, the IP "rights" the original creator holds are separate from the ones you hold, and any licence can only remove the latter, the outermost layer.

Which is to say, when you decide not to liberate a work you might otherwise have liberated, you don't "save" the inner parts of the onion from a world that might otherwise hack at them. Instead, you force anybody who wants to use the work to come to you for permission on any "rights" you didn't waive. By making the choice not to liberate fan art, you don't give the work back to the creator, you assert ownership over it.

That is probably not what you want to do.

So, how about the CC-BY-SA? There aren't any problems with that, right? You're not claiming you alone have the right to earn money on the work with the one exception of Mr. Creator that way (who, by the way, is not allowed to earn money on your work with the NC-SA), and it's a true libre licence. Great! Everything's great.

...Except for one little problem. Fandom culture moves too fast and fluidly even for libre licences. Before you've finished explaining copyleft to the person who wants to slap your thing onto a stupid meme template, she'll either have made it or gone elsewhere. So, while libre licences are the ideal solution in theory, they're not a practical one. What's a libre fan artist to do?

Enter CARE.

CARE is a very simple idea. You simply link somebody to this CARE statement to show that you support both libre media and the rapid informal pace of fan culture.

If you have been pointed to this page as a "licence" (it isn't a real licence, to be honest), know that if in doubt, the author of whatever it was attached to values your ability to copy, adapt, and share without restriction, and they both permit and invite you to use it however you like, keeping in mind that if it's a fan work, you may be subject to the whims of the original work's creator. The fan work's creator, however, will not be the one to stop you.

(It goes without saying that they probably don't want you to be a butt with your newfound freedom. Copy courteously, please!)

If there was a real libre licence somewhere near CARE, you can use that licence to eliminate all doubt you have permission, but you don't have to. CARE without a licence is basically the same as the WTFPL (NSFW language), or Copyheart, from which its acronym was inspired.

(If they put a nonlibre licence like the NC-SA next to CARE, disregard this entire page, as none of it can be presumed to be at all relevant. Your reading it was a waste of time and you should angrily shake your fist at them for disregarding the purpose of it.)