Copyfree: about > finances

Financial Record

The general financial circumstances of the Copyfree Initiative are simple:

  1. The organization incurs modest infrastructural and administrative expenses. These expenses are paid out of the pockets of staff. Regular, recurrent expenses include domain registration and hosting costs.

  2. The maintenance of infrastructure incurs technical labor expenses. These expenses are covered by donations of time and effort by staff and volunteers.

  3. Donations may help to defray these costs, as well as contribute to funding needed for organizational goals.

If you wish to donate, please see the Financial Donations section of the support page, accessible from the site menu.

Funding Plans

At this time, plans are in progress for:

Goals

Organizational goals of the Copyfree Initiative that would incur further expenses in the future include, but are not limited to, the following:

Employment

To help improve the value offered by the Copyfree Initiative in its efforts to pursue its mission, offering employment to staff members who currently donate what time they can find outside of their professional lives so that they have more time to devote to the effort is of critical importance. In addition to basic staff needs, administrative management of filing requirements may be required, retention of professional accounting services are increasingly desirable (and may become in effect legally necessary), and dedicated attention to outreach and advocacy efforts cannot long be overlooked in the pursuit of CI goals.

Legal Services

The Copyfree Initiative's goals require legal services for purposes of assessing organizational structuring to meet the needs of further growth, crafting more precise statements about licensing conditions and policy propositions, and other matters that arise in the operation of the CI.

Project Support

A number of possibilities for how the Copyfree Initiative can help support the various cultural and technical projects that represent important resources in the copyfree world, fostering informative and innovative development of significant value to the world, are under consideration. These support efforts go above and beyond the more abstract, broad, and untargeted informational services already offered to the copyfree community or in development by the CI, and the practical possibility of undertaking such efforts will depend on the ability to direct funds toward those ends.

Notes

Unfortunately, as the need for more time to devote to technical and administrative work increases, the available time staff members have to contribute seems to be decreasing. We hope to turn this around by, in the short term, devoting some precious time to improving the funding situation and benefits of organizational infrastructure to help volunteer staff members afford additional time to spend on the important work of the Copyfree Initiative.