On 28 May 2012 22:37, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
I'd love to see -NC and -ND dropped from the CC catalog, but I doubt its going to happen.
It would be nice if -NC and -ND had a time limit on them, after which the work becomes CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.
Although NC and ND cause pain for Wikipedians and Commonists and so on, I'd actually not be a big fan of getting rid of them.
NC and ND give people a chance to dip their toe into free culture licensing. Then upon finding that their leg hasn't been bitten off by ravenous sharks and that actually mostly everything is fine, we can come along and nudge them into upgrading.
See, for instance, the UK government: many government departments published images under NC/ND. And then when nobody got fired for it, they pass the Open Government License, which is a free content license very much like CC BY.*
The question is: does NC/ND give people an excuse not to go for a freer license, or does it give them a stepping stone towards freer license from no licensing? It'd be nice if we could have some evidence on this rather than anecdote trading. ;-)
NC and ND do have some uses. For instance, the very common use case of publishing an academic paper. Yes, CC BY would be better. But BY-ND is still pretty useful for the most common use case for a lot of academic papers, namely photocopying a paper for a whole class of students...
(Plus getting rid of NC and ND won't mean that people won't stop licensing works under NC/ND. There's a huge load of NC/ND work out there already.)
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OGL