On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
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!
Well, and in the end the fact that people are even trying to use semi-permissive to fully-free licenses in the first place is a major step in the right direction. It is easy to forget that most people, even very knowledgeable and well-educated ones, have no idea what copyleft licenses are in the first place. The more people start to think about how copyright actually works, in very simple terms, the better informed they will be about the possibilities of releasing their content freely. One cannot jump from a world where "copyright law" is seen as synonymous with "the most obtuse, confusing, and totally scary area of legal stipulations" to one where people are happily using and understanding copyleft licensing in one simple step.
I've been to academic conferences on intellectual property where it was clear that at least half of the people room didn't really understand how Creative Commons licenses worked or what the intention was. I consider myself fairly well informed about these things and I had to read about three books before I felt really competent to start thinking about copyrights and copylefts in an analytic way.
That being said, I wish that the ND license in particular carried big warnings about it not actually being free, because I've seen lots of people who clearly mean well use ND licenses because they clearly don't understand what "derivative" means in this context.
FF