[WikiEN-l] cc-by-nw (Encyclopedia of Earth)

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 9/24/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at 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