Gregory, thanks for explaining what do others think.
I DON'T BELIEVE to Creative Commons (to Lessig, and if Jimmy continue to argue for CC licenses, I'll stop to trust to him, too) and I don't want to "share" may work under the terms which may help only to a big companies and which would prevent other people to use it.
The only usable CC license is CC-BY. At least, it doesn't prohibit anything.
So, if WMF wants to switch from GFDL/SGFDL to CC-BY-SA, I would start to think how to move GFDL work into another project as well as I will try to forget for WMF projects.
On 12/1/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 1, 2007 3:03 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
What problem do you have with CC-BY-SA?
My reasons for deciding not to use the CC-By-Sa licenses are fairly long and complicated. I don't have the time right now to really dive into it as I'm rather busy. For the purpose of the Foundation's announcement it was enough to say that I have explicitly rejected those terms.
Your question is interesting and deserves a response. So I will provide some quick examples now, but by no means is this my complete position on the reasons I have decided to not use those licenses for my work.
- Laurence Lessig has posted multiple times claiming that it is
acceptable to take illustrations licensed under CC-By-SA and produce combined works which are not freely licensed. For example, if I wrote a since instruction book and created illustrations on how to safely use a bunsen burner a commercial textbook publisher could use my illustrations in their textbook without giving anything back the the world of free content.
I use a copyleft license for my content because copyleft licenses create an incentive to release works under a free license. I see this both as the 'payment' for my works and a way of ensuring that my contribution stays free and isn't captured for the sole profit of another party. With my works copylefted someone creating a new work could choose to purchase commercial stock photography, or they could choose to freely license their work and build off mine.
When someone is really unwilling or unable to freely license their derivative I am willing to license my rates under typical commercial stock photography rates. This provides me with, well, lets just say that I make enough doing this that I report it to the IRS.
Some people are happy with using very liberal licenses (e.g. releasing their work as 'public domain') for all their work and I support their decision, but I've seen first hand how the small friction of copyleft increases the pool of content that is freely available for all, and I wouldn't want to lose that for my illustrations. (For my own works of trivial merit, I 'PD' them because I don't expect any copyleft gains)
Mr. Lessig's position on "share alike" and illustrations isn't well supported by the text of the license, but his position naturally carries a lot of weight.
- The Creative Commons licenses come with misleading front cover
text. If I released my work under these licenses I would be at constant risk of suffering disputes resulting from reusers misunderstanding their rights and obligations. We've experienced the reverse of that numerous times at Wikimedia when people using CC-By-* expect to be able to exactly stipulate how attribution is provided.
- Speaking of 'attribution', the Creative Commons cc-by and by-sa
licenses at version 2.5 and beyond contain a serious issue with their attribution. The attribution clauses in these licenses reads, in part,
"If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must (...) provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (...), and/or (ii) if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties" (...) (through) terms of service or by other reasonable means"
So these by-attribution licenses don't actually provide attribution if a service provider specifies so in their terms of service. Jamesday (en User:Jamesday), a Wikimedian old-schooler, wrote a lot about this back when these terms came out.
Obviously the issue of attribution for collective works in a space limited medium is important, but it can be addressed without giving service providers the ability to take attribution for all freely licensed content distributed through their systems.
The exact implications of that text aren't entirely clear: If the clause only takes effect at the first point of submission it breaks the right to fork, and fails to resolve the collective attribution problem (i.e. you end up with "This article contains material by Wikia(tm), WikiHow(tm), Wikipedia(tm), GregPedia, Planet Math ..."). Or, alternatively, if any down stream service provider can invoke it .. it allows anyone who could claim to be a service provider to remove attribution at any time... which many consider to be morally offensive, and which present practical problems for people trying to keep works free.
Years ago when these terms were first released I was seriously concerned with the implications of giving an author's service provider a special rights in free content licenses. In these days of real concern over net-neutrality my worries on these matter are even greater.
And from here, we could go into the issues with the Creative Commons branding, which many people feel is exploitative, and which Creates Confusion with respect to the licenses. ... which is a matter of great concern to anyone who thinks Free Content should be more than CC-NC-ND.... but I've run out of time.
Thanks for enduring my verbosity, Greg.
Personally, I like the basic concept (do what you want as long as you attribute others, derivatives must be under the same license), but I'm not familiar with the nitty-gritty details. There were some complaints in particular with the newer versions of CC-BY-SA, which I don't recall, but which possibly could be addressed before the compatibility is put into place.
But, in order to have any chance of this, we need to get a list of complaints. What problems do people have with CC-BY-SA? I'm asking this of everyone on the list.
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