I have to wonder whether the combinatorial plethora of creative commons licenses is a problem of some kind.
Believe it or not, I didn't figure out until yesterday that the license names are strings of two-letter tokens identifying modular characteristics of the license. All this time, I had been reading "by," not as an indicator, but as a preposition... I kept thinking it was something like "by" as in "when the wind is north-by-northwest, I can tell a hawk from a handsaw," or "passed by reference," or "two-by- four."
The general public doesn't understand the concept of a free license to begin with, how are they ever going to understand the zoo of possible licenses and what can and can't be done with them?
On 24/09/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
I have to wonder whether the combinatorial plethora of creative commons licenses is a problem of some kind.
...
The general public doesn't understand the concept of a free license to begin with, how are they ever going to understand the zoo of possible licenses and what can and can't be done with them?
This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
- d.
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
It's an important objection:
At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of "Read/Write culture". As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free licenses.
So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear my question.
I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he knew off the top of his head: 2/3rds.
Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free content.
While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)
So I have to side with RMS on this one.
On 24 Sep 2006, at 22:01, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
It's an important objection:
At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of "Read/Write culture". As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free licenses.
So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear my question.
I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he knew off the top of his head: 2/3rds.
Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free content.
While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)
So I have to side with RMS on this one.
Most contributors donating their own content don't care very much what licence they use as they are unlikely to make any financial gain anyway. Look at the amount of material put on YouTube, who get rights automatically.
There are far too many options anyway when uploading a file - who knows how many contributors just give up straight away.
So decide what rights the project needs, and ask for those. It works for text on WP.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Stephen Streater wrote:
Most contributors donating their own content don't care very much what licence they use as they are unlikely to make any financial gain anyway. Look at the amount of material put on YouTube, who get rights automatically.
That's because the vast majority of Youtube users are unaware that they have signed away all rights to their content, whereas most people who choose a non-free Creative Commons licence are well aware of the difference between (taking an example under discussion here) CC-BY-ND and CC-BY-SA. Otherwise they wouldn't have used a Creative Commons licence, they would still use 'all rights reserved'.
Cynical
On 9/24/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is RMS's objection to the CC licenses, by the way - some are free content licenses, some are quite definitely not.
It's an important objection:
At Wikimania, Lessig gave a striking presentation on the importance of "Read/Write culture". As a tangential point in his talk he mentioned that Creative Commons is having fantastic success and presented a graph showing the increase in the number of link-backs to their free licenses.
So, I thought it was only natural to ask what percentage of the CC linkbacks were to actually non-free licenses. Unfortunately they only took one question from the room, so that audience was unable to hear my question.
I grabbed Larry right after his talk and asked him, and fortunately he knew off the top of his head: 2/3rds.
Creative commons is a brand widely associated with Free Content and all the good things we say about free content, but when the layman reaches for Creative Commons licenses what he gets is usually not free content.
While it's true that people are selecting unfree licenses, they are often doing so without the deeper understanding of the longer term wider scale implications of their decisions. ... I'd feel a lot better if folks had to watch Larry's video on Read/Write culture and be told the ways that the various selections inhibit free culture before they can pick the more restrictive licenses... :)
So I have to side with RMS on this one.
I think that there is a bigger point that we are missing here. The fact is that the most restrictive CC license (cc-by-nd-nc, ie. it only allows free, non-commercial redistribution) is still far freer (is that how you spell "more free"?) than normal copyright. Most traditional copyright holders would never allow anything short of normal copyright on their content, let alone a free license. CC gives them an oppertunity to atleast open up their work some, and that not saying little. We can't expect to win them all over at once.
Baby step, people, baby steps. I don't really care all that much about what the ratio of the free licenses to the non-free CC licenses are, aslong as they are CC!
--Oskar
On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think that there is a bigger point that we are missing here. The fact is that the most restrictive CC license (cc-by-nd-nc, ie. it only allows free, non-commercial redistribution) is still far freer (is that how you spell "more free"?) than normal copyright. Most traditional copyright holders would never allow anything short of normal copyright on their content, let alone a free license. CC gives them an oppertunity to atleast open up their work some, and that not saying little. We can't expect to win them all over at once.
Baby step, people, baby steps. I don't really care all that much about what the ratio of the free licenses to the non-free CC licenses are, aslong as they are CC!
Well, and in the end the fact that people are even trying to use semi-permissive to fully-free licenses in the first place is a major step in the right direction. It is easy to forget that most people, even very knowledgeable and well-educated ones, have no idea what copyleft licenses are in the first place. The more people start to think about how copyright actually works, in very simple terms, the better informed they will be about the possibilities of releasing their content freely. One cannot jump from a world where "copyright law" is seen as synonymous with "the most obtuse, confusing, and totally scary area of legal stipulations" to one where people are happily using and understanding copyleft licensing in one simple step.
I've been to academic conferences on intellectual property where it was clear that at least half of the people room didn't really understand how Creative Commons licenses worked or what the intention was. I consider myself fairly well informed about these things and I had to read about three books before I felt really competent to start thinking about copyrights and copylefts in an analytic way.
That being said, I wish that the ND license in particular carried big warnings about it not actually being free, because I've seen lots of people who clearly mean well use ND licenses because they clearly don't understand what "derivative" means in this context.
FF
On 9/24/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Well, and in the end the fact that people are even trying to use semi-permissive to fully-free licenses in the first place is a major step in the right direction.
I don't... not when the semi-permissive nature of the license is only semi permissive in a way which fails to leave almost any of the permitted actions legally clear. Even the creative commons beloved file trading would easily run afoul of the NC terms...
Don't get me wrong, I think that more liberal terms are better... But the less free CC licenses are not more liberal in a material way... If you are safe under them, then you would usually be safe doing what you are doing with all rights reserved material. .. and of course there are gems like SAMPLING+ which pointlessly reject use which even permitted under fair use in the US.
Stephen Streater above made my point more clearly than I did.. Many people don't care, and the CC branding confusion is causing people who don't care to pick licenses which are unfree. They might be more liberal terms than all rights reserved (although I'd argue that they are effectively not...), but they are simply not free.
It's a real pain, but as the producers of one of the largest and well known repositories of Free Content in the world, we should make it a point of keeping people educated on this matter.
[snip]
That being said, I wish that the ND license in particular carried big warnings about it not actually being free, because I've seen lots of people who clearly mean well use ND licenses because they clearly don't understand what "derivative" means in this context.
Biggest issue I've run into with ND is people who think that ND gives them special protection from fraud. "I don't want someone changing my words and then being able to claim I said the modified statement". ... of course, that isn't the job of a copyright license.... (and ND itself doesn't stop a person with malicious intent).. but people don't know better.
Creative Commons at least does a very good job of providing non-legalese outlines of what can and can't be done with the various licenses. I'm not sure if there is anything similar for GFDL or the like, but it certainly would be helpful. Perhaps a nice collection of all the common free licenses and synapses of each one would be a good thing to have in one place.
On 9/24/06, Scott Zager archmagusrm@gmail.com wrote:
Creative Commons at least does a very good job of providing non-legalese outlines of what can and can't be done with the various licenses. I'm not sure if there is anything similar for GFDL or the like, but it certainly would be helpful. Perhaps a nice collection of all the common free licenses and synapses of each one would be a good thing to have in one place.
in theory this is being worked on here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
On 24/09/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/06, Scott Zager archmagusrm@gmail.com wrote:
Creative Commons at least does a very good job of providing non-legalese outlines of what can and can't be done with the various licenses. I'm not sure if there is anything similar for GFDL or the like, but it certainly would be helpful. Perhaps a nice collection of all the common free licenses and synapses of each one would be a good thing to have in one place.
in theory this is being worked on here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
Basically it needs to be filled out, yeah.
- d.