On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)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