Stepstudy.org

How does it work? Here’s an example:

Let’s say you like the text of Becoming Recovered, but you want to adapt it to your particular needs. You are free to rewrite the text so that it is more useful to you. Maybe you want to replace the stories with the stories of people from your group, or maybe you’d like the spiritual language to reflect your religious preference, or maybe you’ve even got a different way of doing prayer and meditation that you’d like to add to the book. Whatever your reason, whatever you’d like to change, you are free to do so, and you can then sell or give away copies of your new version without fear of violating copyright law. The book is yours, and you can do whatever you want with it.

There are only a few restrictions:

1. Rename your version of the book. If you like, you can include “Becoming Recovered” in your title. (For example: Becoming Recovered, with additions by John D. or Healing Power, based on Becoming Recovered 1.0) Please do not use the title “Becoming Recovered 2.0” as we will be making use of this title in the future for our own revisions.

2. Include the following disclaimer somewhere in the first few pages, either on the title or verso pages, or on another page before the beginning of the text:

“This work is based on or includes passages of Becoming Recovered 1.0, an open-source recovery text that can be found at stepstudy.org. The author of Becoming Recovered 1.0 waives copyright over that text and instead presents it as public domain material. The author(s) of this version of the text acknowledge that their copyright is limited to large-scale, original additions to the text and does not apply to word changes, sentence alterations, or the original passages of Becoming Recovered 1.0.”

3. The author of Becoming Recovered 1.0 maintains the right to deny open source privileges to any authors who use this text for the purposes of libel or discrimination. All uses of the source text that include derogatory statements about racial or ethnic groups, religious organizations, persons of a particular gender or sexual preference, or any other group or individual will be prosecuted as violations of copyright law.

That’s it. If you can comply with those three conditions, you can take the book and do whatever you want with it.

Don’t forget to let us know about your new version, so we can link to it from stepstudy.

And of course, as always, if you like BR 1.0 as it is and don’t want to change it, you are free to download it and print out as many copies as you want, using them however you see fit.

If you haven’t yet read the book, check out an excerpt in the post below.