---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mike Linksvayer ml@creativecommons.org Date: 16 Jan 2008 14:20 Subject: [cc-licenses] CC0 beta/discussion draft launch To: cc-licenses@lists.ibiblio.org
CC0[http://creativecommons.org/projects/cczero] is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion.
As announced[http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7920] on CC's 5th anniversary, today we are announcing a beta of the CC0 user interface[http://labs.creativecommons.org/license/zero] and technical specification[http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCZero_Technical_Overview] and discussion drafts of the CC0 legal tools:
The CC0 Waiver[http://labs.creativecommons.org/licenses/zero-waive/1.0/us/] will enable the author or owner of a work to affirm the copyright and related or neighboring legal rights that he or she has in a work, and then to fully, permanently and irrevocably waive those rights. By making this waiver, the Affirmer effectively dedicates all copyright or related legal interests he or she held in the work to the public domain – "no rights reserved". The CC0 Waiver (United States) will be an effective legal tool within the US and any other jurisdictions with equivalent law. It also will also be offered as a template indicating the scope of most of the rights that must be covered in other jurisdictions in order to effect an equivalent dedication to the public domain. Some jurisdictions may need to address additional rights, for example "sui generis" database rights and specific rights to data.
The CC0 Assertion[http://labs.creativecommons.org/licenses/zero-assert/1.0/us/] will provide a means by which any person may assert that there are no copyrights in a work, within a system that permits others to judge the reliability of the assertion, based on the Asserter's identity and other information the Asserter may provide. The CC0 Assertion (United States) is intended to address copyright status under US law. The Assertion may not be appropriate for Works created in or whose copyright status is governed by the law of other jurisdictions.
Internationalization
As with our existing core legal tools (six licenses ranging from Attribution to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives), we want the CC0 waiver and assertion legal tools to be valid worldwide and eventually ported to many jurisdictions worldwide to take into account the nuances of copyright law in those jurisdictions. Our strategy and schedule for accomplishing these goals will be based on feedback from our international project[http://creativecommons.org/international] jurisdiction leads, who are responsible for the same process for our existing tools.
Norms
One of the use cases for CC0 is the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data[http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/], also announced[http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/12/16/announcing-protocol-for...] in conjunction with CC's 5th birthday. In addition to fulfilling the protocol's legal requirements, the CC0 technical infrastructure will also support the assertion of non-legal community norms in conjunction with a work, beginning with the norm of citation in the context of science.
Discussion
Feedback on the legal tools should be directed to the cc-licenses mailing list. Only subscribers may post and the list is moderated so that off-topic posts do not burden subscribers. To join go to http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
Similarly, technology feedback should be directed to http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel
General comments may be directed to http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community
These discussions will be summarized at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCZero_Feedback
Deployment
The CC0 beta and drafts referenced above are only intended to be used for testing and feedback. The beta/discussion period will last a minimum of one month and most likely include several incremental betas and drafts, depending on community feedback.
If your organization plans significant support for CC0 upon its release for production use, please contact press@creativecommons.org concerning potential coordination. _______________________________________________ cc-licenses mailing list cc-licenses@lists.ibiblio.org http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
On 16/01/2008, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mike Linksvayer ml@creativecommons.org CC0[http://creativecommons.org/projects/cczero] is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion.
So is it useful for us to add CC0 as a licence option equivalent to our "public domain or equivalent" (where, if public domain release is not possible, the work is licenced for use by anyone for any purpose)? How's the uptake of CC0?
- d.
On 16/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So is it useful for us to add CC0 as a licence option equivalent to our "public domain or equivalent" (where, if public domain release is not possible, the work is licenced for use by anyone for any purpose)? How's the uptake of CC0?
If we added such an option, I imagine it would be to /replace/ PD-self, not as something alongside it. It seems like it could be a reasonable thing for us to do but I expect our legal heads to give it a once-over first.
As for uptake, it was literally launched a few months ago, so there is no uptake to speak of. The Open Clipart Library (OCAL) is planning to switch to it (they were previously using CC-PD, public domain dedication).
I am a bit confused as to how the second bit works, "providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion." *imagines digg-style voting on PD justifications* mm... not quite.
cheers Brianna
On 1/16/08, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 16/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So is it useful for us to add CC0 as a licence option equivalent to our "public domain or equivalent" (where, if public domain release is not possible, the work is licenced for use by anyone for any purpose)? How's the uptake of CC0?
If we added such an option, I imagine it would be to /replace/ PD-self, not as something alongside it. It seems like it could be a reasonable thing for us to do but I expect our legal heads to give it a once-over first.
Input encouraged from legal and non-legal heads...
As for uptake, it was literally launched a few months ago,
The project was first mentioned 2007-11-14 at http://public.resource.org/case_law_announcement.html and is now in a public discussion phase. There should be zero uptake at this point, as it isn't ready to use. :)
so there is no uptake to speak of. The Open Clipart Library (OCAL) is planning to switch to it (they were previously using CC-PD, public domain dedication).
There will probably be a long list of existing CC PD dedication users and others publishing copyright-free stuff ready to implement CC0, when it is ready, but that will take some time.
I am a bit confused as to how the second bit works, "providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion." *imagines digg-style voting on PD justifications* mm... not quite.
More likely curators that have already built up reputation offline, like museums, but assertions on a community site could be more or less trusted depending on the community. I'd probably trust information that survives on Wikimedia Commons more than that which gets voted up on a digg style site. :)
To be clear, CC isn't building a trust metric, but hopes that with some standards around such assertions others could build such metrics.
Mike
On 16/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So is it useful for us to add CC0 as a licence option equivalent to our "public domain or equivalent" (where, if public domain release is not possible, the work is licenced for use by anyone for any purpose)?
No since we have zero interest in promoting CC branding of free material. Fealing with dozens of different legal systems and the various loopholes and exceptions within them is quite complex enough without someone attempting a re-branding exercise in the middle of it. We do not need a further source of confusion ("you said PD but it says CC" here is really really not needed).
"CC0[http://creativecommons.org/projects/cczero] is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, "
Our templates already do a better job of that.
"and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion."
I see gameing.
All in all our current systems do everything CC-0 does but better.
On 17/01/2008, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 16/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So is it useful for us to add CC0 as a licence option equivalent to our "public domain or equivalent" (where, if public domain release is not possible, the work is licenced for use by anyone for any purpose)?
No since we have zero interest in promoting CC branding of free material.
Hm, do we also have no interest in providing better (or even any) machine readability for our content?
Treating everything that comes out of CC like poison is as unuseful as treating everything that comes out of CC like gold. The question is: what would the benefits for Commons be? And I see the answer as better machine readability and the general benefits that eventually come from standardisation. Not tomorrow, but if in a few years people go "oh yeah, CC-0, I'm familiar with that from X,Y & Z other sites" then... everyone benefits.
regards Brianna
On 16/01/2008, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Hm, do we also have no interest in providing better (or even any) machine readability for our content?
Machine readability would be good. Note that CC-GFDL exists precisely for this.
Is CC0 actually any different from {{PD-self}} legally?
Treating everything that comes out of CC like poison is as unuseful as treating everything that comes out of CC like gold. The question is: what would the benefits for Commons be? And I see the answer as better machine readability and the general benefits that eventually come from standardisation. Not tomorrow, but if in a few years people go "oh yeah, CC-0, I'm familiar with that from X,Y & Z other sites" then... everyone benefits.
Creative Commons interests aren't identical to Wikimedia's, but Not Invented Here is not a good reason to shun their work if it's useful.
- d.
On Jan 16, 2008 3:20 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 16/01/2008, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Hm, do we also have no interest in providing better (or even any) machine readability for our content?
Machine readability would be good. Note that CC-GFDL exists precisely for this.
Thats arguable. It's trivial to specify machine readable GFDL licensing without any CC involvement:
E.g. <head><link href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html" rel="copyright"/></head>
(MediaWiki has auto-magically done this for eons)
Which is the same way the CC authored licenses are identified. Standards are a wonderful thing, in part because they work without you having to promote a particular brand.
Now go ask google why they won't include these in their search by license. :)
Creative Commons interests aren't identical to Wikimedia's, but Not Invented Here is not a good reason to shun their work if it's useful.
Indeed, but perhaps we should follow suit and just slap Wiki in front of everything that we didn't invent? ;)
Wiki-CC-Public-domain anyone? ;)
I mean, ... Creative Commons gets an A for effort, but "branding" the idea of specifying more than one licensing option? (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Ccplus)
I always thought that it was possible to promote a useful idea without stamping your name all over it. Am I just old fashioned? Or is that CC-iFogie 2.0 now? ;)
Not that I think branding is pointless. On the contrary, like all marketing it can be very powerful in subtle ways. Branding can be deeply psychologically manipulative. Which is all the more reason to be cautious in how we interact with it.
It does us no good to promote brands which are themselves promoting confusion that harms our long term mission.
Creative Commons continues to discriminate against some human endeavors by making NC-family licenses their primary recommendation and by promoting loaded language like "free to use or share, *even commercially*". It also continues to conflate vastly different licensing schemes under the same name, creating confusion which we suffer from daily, and it promotes a careless oversimplification of licensing which results in many claims of free licensing not being worth the electrons they are printed on. And brand promotion and adoption seem to rule over considered philosophical positions. So long as CC continues to do things like this, I'll continue to believe that brand association is not in our best interest.
CC's branding habits make it hard to use their *work* if you are not interested in promoting their *brand*. If CC0 were purely a neutral promotional campaign for standard machine readable PD tagging, and the usage of PD, without forcing adopters to use their brand and build more links back to them I'd be on it like bees on honey, and it would be a lot easier to get groups like government agencies to adopt it.
This doesn't mean that we avoid things that have clear value, ... The key is David's last words "if it's useful". I'm not seeing it here.
On 17/01/2008, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
It does us no good to promote brands which are themselves promoting confusion that harms our long term mission.
Creative Commons continues to discriminate against some human endeavors by making NC-family licenses their primary recommendation and by promoting loaded language like "free to use or share, *even commercially*". It also continues to conflate vastly different licensing schemes under the same name, creating confusion which we suffer from daily, and it promotes a careless oversimplification of licensing which results in many claims of free licensing not being worth the electrons they are printed on. And brand promotion and adoption seem to rule over considered philosophical positions. So long as CC continues to do things like this, I'll continue to believe that brand association is not in our best interest.
I don't see that we really have a choice, frankly.
If not CC, then who?
Any copyleft-related movements benefit enormously from *few* dominant licenses, right? It reduces confusion, promotes large body of intermixable works, and that body of work under the same license is what can draw people into it who are otherwise not idealogically fussed about it.
CC is clearly working its butt off to promote themselves as the prominent org and set of licenses to consider when it comes to alternatives to traditional copyright. They do it well -- and as they should. The FSF has shown no interest in promoting non-software licenses - and probably quite rightly too, given their name and mission, it's not quite in their bounds.
Geni seems to suggest in this thread that Wikimedia should be promoting some things like licenses. I'd like to be convinced that that's within our mission.
So if not CC, then who?
Like you I am also deeply disappointed that CC 1) makes no attempt to encourage people to choose truly free licenses (CC-BY,CC-BY-SA) 2) makes no arguments about freedom for users,society rather than freedom for authors 3) does not promote careful distinction between its licenses.
But I don't see how the fact that they are self-promoting is inherently problematic.
If CC is going to be out there winning this race -- and they are, 'cause no one else is competing -- then maybe we should be one step behind them calling out the useful reminders that CC doesn't emphasise.
This doesn't mean that we avoid things that have clear value, ... The key is David's last words "if it's useful". I'm not seeing it here.
Well, fine! That's all the point of my bringing this up was.
(BTW Greg, nice to see you posting again)
cheers, Brianna
On 18/01/2008, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Geni seems to suggest in this thread that Wikimedia should be promoting some things like licenses. I'd like to be convinced that that's within our mission.
The educational bit. CC-0 is not educational. Our templates that tend to at least give a passing explanation as to why people think something is PD are. This is too our benefit.
On Jan 16, 2008 1:39 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Treating everything that comes out of CC like poison is as unuseful as treating everything that comes out of CC like gold. The question is: what would the benefits for Commons be? And I see the answer as better machine readability and the general benefits that eventually come from standardisation. Not tomorrow, but if in a few years people go "oh yeah, CC-0, I'm familiar with that from X,Y & Z other sites" then... everyone benefits.
Arguably the words "public domain" should be within spitting distance of CC0's near-term potential in terms of recognition and uniformity in practice.
If there is not enough public understanding of the words "public domain", then I think efforts would be better spent on educating people about the meaning of "public domain" rather than though additional fragmentation of the same body of work.
If, on the other hand, the CC0 grant included some kind of binding warranty on the copyright status of the work, then I think it would potentially provide great value as an alternative to PD-self (although not a replacement, because a warranty-providing grant wouldn't be isomorphic). This isn't an outrageous suggestion. The original CC license had a property along these lines, but it was removed based on objections from (I think) bloggers who just wanted to re-distribute stuff without considering that aspect.
I am highly skeptical of vague mentions of "reputation systems". I think we need to see an established and proven solution before we go about standardizing on a single interface.
Reputation systems are very trendy right now among people who produce many ideas but few implementations. Since reputation does not appear to have the transitive property (that is, knowing A trusts B and B trusts C still does not tell us about A's trust of C), it remains to be seen if these systems can offer value in the real world. Even if they can, standardizing on an interface prematurely may stunt the development of better systems that actually do work.
(Warranties do offer clearly established real world value, on the other hand, and I'd have no problem offering a reasonably-scoped binding promise of non-infringement on works that I created.)
Wikimedia Commons today has probably the closest to a working large-scale community copyright system, but it's nowhere near done enough or formalized enough to code into some RDF data. It's a very lossy system with a lot of failures, but it is clearly better than nothing at all, which is what a lot of other user-contributed repositories have.
As far as I can tell, CC0 as proposed is primarily a branding exercise.
If it is successful, then using it at some point in the future might be beneficial for us. But as it stands, this is an instance where we should probably be following and not leading, since it would appear to confer no advantage to us, and it may potentially result in creating more confusion due to the already heavily overloaded term "creative commons".
On the other hand, unlike some other branding exercises, I don't see this one as actively detrimental to our mission. There may be value in supporting it if only so no one can claim that we are "treating everything that comes out of CC like poison", when our positions really are more nuanced than that.
(and shame shame Brianna, I think Geni's position was more nuanced than you gave him credit for! :) )
On 16/01/2008, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 17/01/2008, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 16/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So is it useful for us to add CC0 as a licence option equivalent to our "public domain or equivalent" (where, if public domain release is not possible, the work is licenced for use by anyone for any purpose)?
No since we have zero interest in promoting CC branding of free material.
Hm, do we also have no interest in providing better (or even any) machine readability for our content?
We have various mechanisms for doing that within our existing systems. Machine readability may not be great but is getting better.
Treating everything that comes out of CC like poison is as unuseful as treating everything that comes out of CC like gold. The question is: what would the benefits for Commons be? And I see the answer as better machine readability and the general benefits that eventually come from standardisation. Not tomorrow, but if in a few years people go "oh yeah, CC-0, I'm familiar with that from X,Y & Z other sites" then... everyone benefits.
A few years? In that kind of time frame we could have people talking about {{PD-self}} and our own machine readable system.