[Commons-l] Fwd: [cc-licenses] CC0 beta/discussion draft launch

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 16, 2008 1:39 PM, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at 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! :) )