NC GPL CREATION: How and why the NC GPL was created.

The year was now 1998. Other Churches and Worship leaders were asking me if they could sing my songs and use them on recordings. The only way I could find to release a song for free was to place it in the Public Domain. There were two major drawbacks to the Public Domain. Theoretically, someone could simply change a few words or few notes in the melody line and they could legally copyright the song as their own and even charge the original author to use the song. Secondly, that same year, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, was voted into law by the United States Congress, effectively ending works from ever again entering the Public Domain in the USA.

What to do. Is there another legal pathway? I consulted with a small group of like-minded lawyers and copyright experts; professors from Arizona State University and Yale University and an intellectual property lawyer in my city. We first studied the GNU GPL used to create and release LINUX software. LINUX was an alternative to Microsoft Software, excepted it was created by software coders from all over the world without compensation, so the world could use it in turn use LINUX for free.

Based on that GPL and other research, the NC GPL was born and registered with the Library of Congress in the year 2000, the first year of a new Millennium!

Since then many have expanded on this same concept. The most recognizable and understandable would be Wikipedia. Wikipedia calls itself the Free Encyclopedia.

“Wikipedia is an online free content encyclopedia project helping create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. The project is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of freely editable content.”

Basically, Wikipedia is created for free so it can be used for free. Wikipedia originally used the GNU GPL (the same license we used as a pattern) but has now migrated to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Because of its wide use, we also considered using the Creative Commons Attribution license, but even this license does not provide the same protections and freedoms as the NC GPL. The No Compromise General Public License was specifically designed using Biblical principals, for the use of the Body of Christ.