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.