Copyleft

The content of the site The Brain from Top to Bottom is under copyleft.

The concept of "copyleft" is a method of providing free access to the results of original work and of encouraging people to reproduce and even modify this work on an equally free basis.

Copyleft is thus diametrically opposed to the traditional concept of copyright, which nowadays people seem to be trying to use to cover absolutely everything, from genes to intellectual property. In the libertarian spirit, the concept of copyleft promotes freedom of expression and staunchly opposes the idea that knowledge can be the private property of a small elite.

It is also probably no accident that the development of copyleft has been intimately associated with that of the Internet, thanks to open source software such as Linux. The ideal of the earliest explorers of the Internet was always the democratization of information which, thanks to the Net, would at last escape the top-down control of the commercial media. But nowadays, people with something to sell or advertise have invaded the Net to such an extent that we have forgotten the primary purpose of personal Web sites: to share our passions with other people.

The Brain from Top to Bottom was designed in precisely this spirit of sharing knowledge, and so has not hesitated to embrace the philosophy of copyleft. Not only are you allowed to reproduce this site in whole or in part on any medium you can imagine, but you are even encouraged to do so! Just make sure you comply with the following two conditions: you must not use the material for commercial purposes, and you must include the “copyleft” symbol in all versions of the material that you use, so that they too will remain totally accessible to as many people as possible.

That said, since this is a site about scientific knowledge, you should still exercise a certain degree of rigour to make sure that the facts you present are still accurate. But if you want, for example, to use part of this site’s content in a biology course, or reproduce one of its illustrations on another Web site about human behaviour, both of these uses are entirely appropriate.

The text content of The Brain from Top to Bottom is original material, but many of the images have been borrowed from other Web sites. In such cases, we have cited the source whenever possible. Because as far as we are concerned, the Internet must remain a medium for sharing information, and anyone who posts things on the Net but restricts their use excessively is simply using the wrong medium.

Nevertheless, if anyone asks us to stop using an image of which he or she is the author, we will remove that image immediately.